ANU Southeast Asia Institute Global Lecture

Bridging the local and the global: How can scholars of International Studies benefit from expertise on Southeast Asia and vice versa?

Southeast Asia is a 'regional world' that both reflects and contributes to the making of the contemporary world order. Studying Southeast Asia can help development of concepts and theories that can travel beyond the region and contribute to social sciences and humanities. Drawing on his path-breaking research, Amitav Acharya reflects on how Southeast Asia has informed and shaped his perspectives on wider issues of global affairs and world order. He provides examples of how his theoretical development of security communities, norm localization, regional institutions and global governance, conceptualisation of world order as 'multiplex world', and Global International Relations, were deeply influenced by his scholarship on Southeast Asia.

Speaker

Amitav Acharya is Distinguished Professor and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University. He has received the International Studies Association Distinguished Scholar Award three times, in recognition of his 'influence, intellectual works and mentorship' and 'extraordinary impact' on the study of International Relations. His academic articles have been published in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, and International Affairs, while his current affairs essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Times of India. His major works on Southeast Asia/ASEAN include: From Southeast Asia to Indo-Pacific: Culture, Identity and Return to Geopolitics (Penguin Random House 2025); ASEAN and Regional Order: Revisiting Security Community in Southeast Asia (Routledge 2021); Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problems of Regional Order (Routledge 2001, 2002, 2014); Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Cornell 2009); and The Making of Southeast Asia (Cornell 2013).

The ANU Southeast Asia Institute Global Lecture explores and celebrates Southeast Asia as an influential site of knowledge production. It features prominent scholars of Southeast Asia who have made wider disciplinary or interdisciplinary contributions through their work on the region.

Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov on Unsplash

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