Kwa Chong Guan is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He joined its Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at its inception in 1996 as Head of External Relations, coordinating and growing the Institute’s networking with other policy institutions in the region. As Senior Fellow, he continues to support a series of regional security projects with other regional institutions. These range from maritime security to non-traditional security issues of energy security, cybersecurity, nuclear energy safety and security and biosecurity.
He is Co-Chair of the Singapore Member Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and in that capacity was elected the ASEAN Co-Chair of CSCAP for 2011-2013. He has co-chaired several of the Council’s Working and Study Groups and drafting of its Memorandums. Kwa is the RSIS Board Member of the “China-Southeast Asia Research Centre on the South China Sea” which brings together six Southeast Asian policy institutes to work with the China’s “National Institute for South China Sea Studies.”
He was previously Head of the old Department of Strategic Studies at the SAFTI Military Institute where he taught military history and strategic studies while concurrently teaching history at the School of Arts at the National Institute of Education. He began his career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before being assigned to the Ministry of Defence and later, the Ministry of Information and the Arts to reorganise and restructure the old National Museum and National Archives.
The conceptual underpinnings of Kwa’s work are the interstices of history, security studies and international relations of Southeast Asia. At RSIS, he works on a range of regional security issues with a focus on the implicit narratives underlying our framing of regional security. At the History Department of the National University of Singapore and at the Archaeological Unit at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, he is interested in issues in the long cycles and deep history of Southeast Asian history.
