Emeritus Professor Carlyle Thayer

Biography

Carlyle A. Thayer is Emeritus Professor, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), Canberra. Thayer studied political science at Brown and was awarded an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from Yale (1971) and a PhD in International Relations from The Australian National University (ANU, 1977). He served in Vietnam with the International Voluntary Services (1967-68). Thayer first taught at the Bendigo Institute of Technology/Bendigo College of Advanced Education in Victoria from 1975 to 1978. He joined the UNSW in 1979 and taught first in the Faculty of Military Studies at The Royal Military College-Duntroon before transferring to University College at ADFA in 1985. He was head of the Department of Politics (1995-97), promoted to full Professor in 1998 and formally retired in 2010. Thayer was given ‘leave in the national interest’ to take up a senior appointment at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Pacific Command, Hawaii (1999-2002). On return to Australia he was appointed Deakin University’s On-Site Academic Coordinator for the senior Defence and Strategic Studies Course at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies (CDSS), Australian Defence College (2002-2004). He then directed Regional Security Studies at the Australian Command and Staff College (2006-2007 and 2010). In 2005 he was honoured by appointment as the C. V. Starr Distinguished Visiting Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, and in 2008 as the Inaugural Frances M. Stephen H. Fuller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Southeast Aisan Studies at Ohio University. Thayer has also held appointments at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs; Yale University’s Department of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the ANU’s Department of Political and Social Change, and Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the ANU. Thayer is a Southeast Asia regional specialist. He is currently Director of Thayer Consultancy a small business registered in Australia that provides political analysis and research support on current regional security issues. Thayer also writes a weekly column on Southeast Asian defence and security affairs for The Diplomat. He is the author of over 500 publications including: ‘China and ASEAN’, in Mahendra Gaur, ed., Studies on China No. 3 (New Delhi: Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 2015), 208-215; ‘China and Vietnam Eschew Megaphone Diplomacy’, The Diplomat, January 2, 2015; ‘Vietnam Mulling New Strategies to Deter China’, The Diplomat, May 28, 2014; ‘ASEAN and China Consultations on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea: Prospects and Obstacles’, in Security and Cooperation in the South China Sea (Moscow: Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2014), 34-49; ‘China-ASEAN and the South China Sea: Chinese Assertiveness and Southeast Asian Responses’, in Yann-huei Song and Keyuan Zou, eds., Major Law and Policy Issues in the South China Sea: European and AmericanPerspectives (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Inc., 2014), 25-53; and Southeast Asia: Patterns of Security Cooperation (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2010).