Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Thitinan Pongsudhirak is professor of international relations at Chulalongkorn University’s faculty of political science and a senior fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok.

Mr. Pongsudhirak has held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Victoria in New Zealand and Yangon University, and currently serves on several editorial boards of academic journals, including Journal of Democracy.

He has authored a host of articles, books, book chapters and over 1,000 opinion articles in mass media such as Project Syndicate, the Bangkok Post, The Straits Times, Nikkei Asian Review, the South China Morning Post, The New York Times International Edition and the Financial Times.

As an analyst on Thailand, ASEAN and Southeast Asia, his comments and views have appeared regularly in international media, including Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, NHK and DW, among others.

Prior to his academic and think-tank career, Mr. Pongsudhirak worked at The Nation newspaper in Bangkok, the BBC World Service and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London. His current work focuses on the comparative politics and geopolitics/geoeconomics of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific in view of the United States-China rivalry and competition. In 2015, he was recognized for excellence in opinion writing by the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA).

Since 2017, he has held the appointment as international advisory board member of the Asia New Zealand Foundation (ANZF). In March 2018, he was appointed ASEAN@50 fellow by New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade. In May 2019, he was selected as Australia-ASEAN fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute. Since 2021, he has been a senior advisor for geopolitics with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). In 2023, he was appointed an independent expert for the ADMM Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence (ACICE). In January 2024, Mr. Pongsudhirak was awarded a commendation by the Japanese government for his work on Japan-Thailand and Japan-ASEAN relations.

He completed degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, winning the United Kingdom’s best dissertation prize in 2002.