Rising Asia Journal
Rising Asia Foundation
ISSN 2583-1038
PEER REVIEWED | MULTI-DISCIPLINARY | EASTERN FOCUS

NOTE ON THE AUTHORS

Ang Cheng Guan is the Associate Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) and Deputy Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS). His previous positions were Head of Graduate Studies (RSIS); Head of Studies (IDSS) and Head (Humanities and Social Studies Education, National Institute of Education). He specializes in the international history of contemporary Asia with a focus on Southeast Asia. He is the author of Vietnamese Communist Relations with China and the Second Indo-China Conflict, 1956-1962 (Jefferson: MacFarland, 1997); The Vietnam War from the Other Side: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective (London: RoutledgeCurzon), its sequel, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War  (London: Routledge, 2010); Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought (London: Routledge, 2013); and Singapore, ASEAN and the Cambodia Conflict, 1979-1991 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013). Most recently, he co-edited Perspectives on the Security of Singapore (Singapore: World Scientific, and London: Imperial College Press, 2015), which includes a chapter on “Singapore’s Conception of Security.” He has published in edited volumes as well as in journals including Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary History, War and Society, War in History, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Security Dialogue, Southeast Asia Research, Cold War History, Asian Security, Asian Studies Review and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. He was a Gerald R. Ford Foundation Research Grant Award recipient (Fall 2005), Fulbright Singapore Researcher award recipient (2006-2007), and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar (2006-2007). He is also a recipient of the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) and the National Institute of Education Excellence in Teaching Commendation (2013). He was a member of the Resource Panel, Government Parliamentary Committee for Defence & Foreign Affairs (2002-2006). His most recent publications are Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018), and its sequel, Southeast Asia after the Cold War: A Contemporary History (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019). His next book on the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization will be published in 2021. He is currently writing a book on Singapore’s Grand Strategy.

Jing Chen graduated from Nanjing Foreign Language School, Jiangsu province, and studies theatre at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. She is broadly interested in modern China studies, gender studies in the Chinese context, and East Asian cinema studies. Her essay Human-Elephant Conflict in China: A Review of Current Management Strategies and Future Directions has appeared in China Global Dialogue. She is currently based in Nanjing.

Tuan Hoang is Associate Professor of Great Books at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and an editorial board member of Rising Asia Journal. He received his PhD in history from University of Notre Dame in 2013 and, since then, has been teaching in the Great Books, History, and Humanities programs at Pepperdine. His research focuses on twentieth-century Vietnamese religious history and the history of Vietnamese Catholic refugees in the United States. His publications include “Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience,” American Catholic Studies 130.1 (Spring 2019), and “From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons: Historicizing Vietnamese Diasporic Anticommunism,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11.2 (May 2016). His forthcoming works include a chapter about Vietnamese American perspectives on freedom for the edited volume The Vietnamese Diaspora in a Transnational Context: Contested Spaces, Contested Narratives (Brill), and a chapter on the Vietnamese diaspora for the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War (Cambridge University Press).

Vinay Kaura is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs and Security Studies, Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice, a university under the Department of Home, Government of Rajasthan, India. As the Deputy Director of the University’s Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies, his major responsibility is to teach as well as coordinate executive training and research programs on security studies and counterterrorism for India’s mid-level police professionals belonging to the state and central paramilitary organizations. He is also an adjunct faculty on the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies (PTSS) at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. He has a Masters’ degree in both History and Political Science, and a PhD degree in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations with special reference to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. His research interests are counterterrorism, counter insurgency, de-radicalization, political warfare, geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, Afghanistan-Pakistan relations, and conflict resolution in Kashmir. Some of his recent publications are “India’s Relations with China from the Doklam Crisis to the Galwan Tragedy,” India Quarterly 76 (4), 2020; “Prospects of Israel-Pakistan rapprochement,” Israel Affairs, 26 (6), 2020; “India’s federalism puzzle, counter-terrorism challenge and NCTC debate,” Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, 15 (2), 2020; and “Incorporating Indo-Pacific and the Quadrilateral into India’s strategic outlook,” Maritime Affairs, 15 (2), 2019. His edited book titled India’s National Security: Vision 2030 was published in November 2020. His opinion pieces and commentaries have appeared in leading newspapers.

Harish C. Mehta holds a PhD (McMaster University, Canada) in American foreign relations and Southeast Asia. His book publications are People’s Diplomacy of North Vietnam (Cambridge Scholars, 2019), and three works on Cambodian politics (Cambodia Silenced, White Lotus Press, Bangkok), Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen (co-author Dr Julie Mehta, Marshall Cavendish, Singapore); and Warrior Prince: Norodom Ranariddh (Graham Brash, Singapore). His articles on Vietnamese diplomacy have appeared in the American journals International History Review, Diplomatic HistoryPeace & ChangeThe HistorianHistory Compass and his reviews have been published in H-Diplo. He has taught history at McMaster, University of Toronto, and Trent University in Canada. He has twice won the Samuel Flagg Bemis Research Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Asian Print Media Write Award from the Asian Media Information and Communication Center, Singapore, a Freedom Forum Fellowship, Washington, DC, and he has won the Mitsubishi Journalist of the Year Prize from the Press Foundation of Asia and Mitsubishi. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Rising Asia Journal. He was formerly Senior Indochina Correspondent for The Business Times of Singapore and Managing Editor of Imprint magazine.

Ryan Mitra is currently a first-year master’s student at The Graduate Institute Geneva. He is pursuing his Master’s in International Affairs with a specialization in Global Security, and Peace, Conflict, and Development. His main areas of interests are Indian foreign policy, disarmament, Indo-Pacific and Asian geopolitics, maritime affairs, humanitarian affairs and human rights. Since 2017, he has published multiple articles on topics ranging from India’s maritime policy, Indo-Pacific maritime politics, and refugee affairs in South Asia in journals such as Maritime Affairs: Journal of the National Maritime Foundation of India, and Sigma Iota Rho Journal of International Affairs, and he actively publishes commentaries for the blogs of the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and The Graduate Institute Geneva. His pieces on India’s relations with Indonesia, India’s foreign policy relating to Indo-Pacific Island countries, and India’s policy compendium in the Indo-Pacific have been well received by the relevant academic communities. He has also interned with the Southern Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, India and is currently a capstone student researcher with United Nations Human Rights and the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights.

Ingudam Yaipharemba Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of National Security Studies at Manipur University, Imphal, Manipur. With a PhD and MA from the Department of Defence and National Security Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, his areas of research interest are conflict resolution, politics of ethnic conflict, non-traditional security paradigms and borderland politics of Northeast India. Some of his publications are the book, The South China Sea Disputes & Opportunities for India (Eastern Book Corporation, 2020), articles in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Dialogue Quarterly, Volume 2, No. 2 (October-December 2019); Man and Society, Volume XV (Summer 2018); Journal of Politics, Volume XVIII (2018); Journal of North East India Studies, Volume 8, No. 1 (January-June 2018); World Focus, Volume XXXIX, No. 6 (June 2018), and Volume XXXIX, No. 4 (April 2018); Journal of Indian Education, Volume XLIII, No. 3 (November 2017); and Research Journal Social Sciences, Volume 22, No. 1 (2014). He has also published chapters in edited volumes in many national and international publications such as Kalpaz (2020), Mittal (2020), Routledge (2019), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2019), Central West Publishing (2019), and Ansh Book International (2016).

Toh Han Shih holds a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in physics from Oxford University. He also has a Master’s in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has completed a part-time Master’s in Economics at Hong Kong University. Han Shih is a Singapore-born writer resident in Hong Kong with twenty years of experience reporting on business and economics related to China, including ten years as a reporter with the South China Morning Post. In December 2016, he published the book, Is China an Empire? From 2007 to 2008, he worked at Kroll, and in the late 1990s, he was a reporter at the Business Times in Singapore. He was also a senior correspondent of MLEX, a regulatory risk news agency, and senior reporter of Finance Asia, a financial trade publication. He is currently chief analyst of Headland Intelligence, a Hong Kong risk consultancy.