My interest in Southeast Asia was first kindled by contact with a number of Malaysian and Singaporean overseas students during my years as an undergraduate student at Waikato University.

A visit to Southeast Asia during my graduate years saw my interest grow in this region. My subsequent doctoral thesis at the University of Auckland combined my interest in New Zealand's diplomatic history with Southeast Asia. I was also able to undertake two years of Indonesian language training at the University of Auckland, which gave me a solid basis to follow this up at a language school in Yogyakarta some years later.

Since completing my formal academic study I have remained a keen student of Southeast Asia as a whole, but have tended to focus largely on Indonesia and Timor Leste. I have undertaken a number of field work trips to Indonesia (including the province of Aceh), was a ballot observer during the Timor Leste referendum in 1999, and I have spent several years in total at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore - with whom I retain a formal affiliation.

In my current position as an Associate Research Professor at the Hawaii-based Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies it is my job to provide written and verbal briefings on key events in Southeast Asia.

Recently I was involved in a team that completed a major project on government views of America's counter-terrorism efforts in Southeast Asia, for which I did the fieldwork interviews in Malaysia and Singapore.

Dr Anthony L Smith 

   You can view the executive summary of Dr Anthony Smith's Outlook paper or the full report. 

   Other Outlook papers.