Seminar 6. Bilahari Kausikan: “South East Asia after the Pandemic”

On Thursday, 7 May 2020, The Department of International Relations and International Laboratory on World Order Studies and the New Regionalism of the National Research University Higher School of Economics held the sixth session of Eurasian Online Seminar. Our speaker was a renowned Singaporean diplomat and scholar Bilahari Kausikan. He spoke on South East Asia after the Pandemic.

Bilahari Kausikan is the Chairman of the Middle East Institute, an autonomous institute of the National University of Singapore. He was educated at Raffles Institution, the University of Singapore and Columbia University in New York. Mr Kausikan was Permanent Secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2013, having served as Second Permanent Secretary since 2001. He was subsequently Ambassador-at-Large until May 2018. His earlier appointments at the Ministry include Deputy Secretary for South-east Asia, Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, and Ambassador to the Russian Federation. He is often referred to as "Singapore's undiplomatic diplomat" for his insightful and comments and analyses on Singaporean and world politics. He has been known in recent years for commenting extensively on Singapore's foreign affairs in newspaper articles, public lectures and social media. 

Mr Kausikan is the other of many articles and several books including: Dealing with an Ambiguous World (a collection of his lectures given in 2016) and Singapore is not an Island (2019).