DR. AMITAV ACHARYA is Chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative and Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, He also holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance since 2011. He was previously Professor of International Relations at York University in Toronto and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Bristol in the UK. He has also taught at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was a Fellow of the Asia Center, Harvard University, and Fellow of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Professor Acharya was elected to the Christensen Fellowship at St Catherine’s College in Oxford in 2012 and held the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professorship in International Relations at Rhodes University, South Africa for 2012-13. He was elected to be the President of the International Studies Association (ISA), the most recognized and influential global network of international studies scholar worldwide, for 2014-15. As the first ISA President from outside the West, he promoted the idea of Global IR, with the goal of injecting more diversity into the study of international relations and making it into a more dynamic and inclusive discipline and overcoming its hitherto neglect of the voices and experiences of the Global South. His areas of research and writing include Southeast Asian affairs, Asian security, international relations theory, and comparative regionalism. He has published widely on Southeast Asian and Asian regionalism, and the diffusion of ideas and norms in world politics.