My research combines micro-sociology, ethnography, and practice-based approaches to show how global politics is produced and performed ‘on the ground.’ I apply this approach to the substantive study of diplomacy and international bureaucracy, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and South Asia.  

I am currently working on three projects.  My first project is a political sociology of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – a diplomatic body forged at the height of Cold War counterrevolution in Southeast Asia that has outlasted Afro-Asian, Socialist, and Black internationalist projects of postcolonial worldmaking in the twentieth century. I have completed a book manuscript (under review) based on more than a decade of fieldwork for this project. Titled “Architects of ‘Nothing’: The Cultural Production of Inaction in ASEAN,” the book is about how seemingly banal and empty activity can have powerful political effects.

My second project brings Goffmanian dramaturgy and theatre metaphors to the study of security alignments. I specifically look at how non-alignment (a poorly understood if not widely misunderstood alignment posture) is produced and performed on the stage of world politics. Drawing on a collection of cases from Cold War Asia, I advance a novel conceptual account of the staging of non-alignment in world politics that is also relevant to how it is practiced in the contemporary era of major power contest.

My third project is on the grim, staggeringly complicated, and endlessly fascinating Cold War conflict that was the Third Indochina War (1978-1991). My project zooms in on the diplomacy of conservative capitalist Southeast Asian states as they waged this grand Cold War conflict in the highest corridors of world diplomacy. Please contact me if you would like more information on any of these projects or just touch base to express shared interests. 

Besides my research, I love literary fiction (especially postcolonial fiction in South and Southeast Asia), sci-fi films, and nearly anything by the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz.