Southeast Asia Research Group

2024-25 SEAREG

Southeast Asia Research Group

The Duke Center for International Development serves as the secretariat for the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG), a network of scholars in political science and allied disciplines who are working at the forefront of Southeast Asian studies.

SEAREG was established in 2013 to advance the best new research by emerging social scientists working on Southeast Asia and to build a global community of social scientists studying Southeast Asia.

2024 Winter Conference

Person standing at a lectern and presenting to a seated audience.

Sidney Jones, a senior adviser to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta and adjunct professor at New York University, and John Sidel, the Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, delivered State of the Region and State of the Field keynotes, respectively.

Hosted by Boston University, the conference included the thematic panel sessions: “Identity, Conflict, and the Dynamics of Power” and “Mobilization, Resistance and Democratic Transformation.”

2025 Summer Conference

Large group of people together and smiling

Hosted by Mahidol University in Bangkok, the conference featured keynote addresses by Danny Quah, the Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, the Raffles Professor of Social Sciences in the National University of Singapore's Department of Geography.

Thematic panel sessions highlighted research examining religion, masculinity and the global politics of democracy promotion; institutional power and policy adaptation in Southeast Asia; and Thai politics, representation and historical reckoning.

Additionally, Mahidol coordinated cultural excursions to the Grand Palace and Jim Thompson House Museum for attendees.

SEAREG Fellows

SEAREG Fellows are exceptional advanced PhD candidates or recent PhD graduates in the social sciences who demonstrate outstanding potential as scholars of Southeast Asia. They present their unpublished papers at SEAREG conferences, where they receive valuable feedback from the SEAREG community.

the Winter 2024 Fellows

Kuan-Wu Chen, University of South Carolina: "Mobilize Penal Populism: Duterte’s Narco List"
Hui-Yuan Neo, Cornell University: "Suggestion and Suppression: Regulating Public Perception and Public Knowledge of Data in Autocracies"
Jae Hyun Park, University of Toronto: "Civil War Tycoons: Explaining Rebel Group Entrepreneurism in Myanmar"
Tuwanont Phattharathanasut, Academia Sinica: "Continuity and Change in Transnational Youth Activist Networks: From the Network of Young Democratic Asians to the Milk Tea Alliance"
Shourya Sen, Princeton University: "The Pull of the Center Inequality and Autocratic Nation Building as Legacies of Revolution in Upland Laos"

the Summer 2025 Fellows

Attawat Assavanadda, University of Hong Kong: "The Tie that Still Binds: Chinese Ethnicity and Enduring Affinity with China"
Rune Wriedt Larsen, London School of Economics: "The Organisational Origins of Onset: Communist Civil War in the Philippines and Thailand after the Second World War"
Yilin Su, University College London: "Fake News Labels and Public Opinion in Nondemocracies: Evidence from Singapore"

The fellows selected for the Winter 2025 cohort will present their work at the 2025 Winter Conference, hosted by UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Participating in the SEAREG Summer Conference as a SEAREG Fellow has been one of my best conference experiences so far. The quality of the feedback on my work was very high. Meanwhile, SEAREG's focus on community building among junior scholars meant that I left Bangkok not only with a long list of ideas for how to improve and expand my work, but also as part of a network and with new friendships.

Rune Wriedt Larsen

Grants & Fellowships

SEAREG member opportunities, including conferences, travel funding, and pre-dissertation fellowships, are supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Thanks to the Luce Foundation's support, SEAREG awarded 16 travel grants to support participation in the Winter 2024 and Summer 2025 conferences and five pre-dissertation fellowships in 2025 to assist social science PhD students to conduct exploratory research in Southeast Asia for their dissertations. In fall 2025, SEAREG launched a predoctoral fellowship program for aspiring scholars from Southeast Asia who are applying to PhD programs in political science or closely related social science fields in the U.S. or Canada.