Duncan McCargo

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Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where is also a professor of English (by courtesy). McCargo retains an affiliation with the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, where he taught for many years. Prior to joining NTU he served for four years as director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2015 and 2019 McCargo held a shared professorial appointment at Columbia University, where he remains a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

He attended Sandbach School and later gained three degrees from the University of London: a First in English (Royal Holloway 1986); then an MA in Area Studies (Southeast Asia) (1990) and a PhD in Politics (1993) from SOAS. He was an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. McCargo has also taught at Queen's University, Belfast, and at Kobe Gakuin University, Japan. In 2006–2007, he was a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. During the 2015–16 academic year, he was a Visitor at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

McCargo is best known for his writing on contemporary Thailand and Asia-related topics. His work deals mainly with the nature of power: how entrenched elites seek to retain it, and how challengers seek to undermine their legitimacy.