Document Code: SG-H-THINK-31 Full Title: Joseph Chinyong Liow — The Cartographer of Southeast Asian Insecurity: An Intellectual Profile of Singapore's Foremost Scholar of Regional Security, Muslim Politics, and Malaysia-Indonesia Relations Coverage Period: c. 1995–present Level Designation: Intellectual Profile Primary Sources Consulted:

Joseph Chinyong Liow, The Politics of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: One Kin, Two Nations (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia, 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2014)
Joseph Chinyong Liow and Ralf Emmers (eds.), Order and Security in Southeast Asia: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer (London: Routledge, 2006)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology, and Politics," Policy Studies, No. 24 (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2006)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Exigency or Expediency? Contextualising Political Islam and the Challenge of Terrorism in Southeast Asia," Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2004), pp. 60–82
Joseph Chinyong Liow and Nadirsyah Hosen (eds.), Islam in Southeast Asia: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2010)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "ISIS Goes to Asia: Extremism in the Middle East Isn't Just a Middle Eastern Problem," Foreign Affairs, September 2014
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "ISIS in the Pacific: Southeast Asia's New Security Threat," Brookings Institution, April 2015
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Malaysia's ISIS Conundrum," Brookings Institution, Order from Chaos blog, 2015
Joseph Chinyong Liow and Amalina Anuar, "The Malay Challenge and Race Relations in Singapore," in Bridget Welsh and James Chin (eds.), Awakening: The Abdullah Badawi Years in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: SIRD, 2013)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Thaification and the Patani Malay Insurgency," in Routledge Handbook of Asian Security Studies (London: Routledge, 2009)
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "The Mahathir Administration's War Against Islamic Militancy," in Daljit Singh and Lorraine Carlos Salazar (eds.), Southeast Asian Affairs 2003 (Singapore: ISEAS, 2003)
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Annual Reports, 2012–2020
Joseph Chinyong Liow and Vibhanshu Shekhar, "Indonesia as a Maritime Power: Jokowi's Vision, Strategies, and Obstacles Ahead," Brookings Institution, November 2014
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Ambitions and Anxieties: The Challenge of Great Power Competition in Southeast Asia," ISEAS Perspective, various years
National Security Coordination Secretariat (NSCS), Singapore, reports and publications on counterterrorism, 2003–2020
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "What Does the South China Sea Ruling Mean, and What's Next?," Brookings Institution, July 2016
Joseph Chinyong Liow, "Contested Narratives: Reclaiming Southeast Asian Islam from Extremism," RSIS Commentary, various years

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SG-F-04 | Singapore and Malaysia
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Version Date: 2026-04-02

Biographical Formation
Complete Bibliography and Major Works
Core Intellectual Framework: Southeast Asia as a Zone of Contested Order
Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: The Architecture of Fraternal Rivalry
Islam and Politics in Malaysia: The Piety-Power Nexus
Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia: A Regional Synthesis
Terrorism, Radicalisation, and the ISIS Challenge in Southeast Asia
Great Power Competition and ASEAN Centrality
Singapore-Malaysia Relations: The View from the Academy
Institution-Building: RSIS and the Professionalisation of Strategic Studies in Singapore
The Brookings Connection and Transnational Policy Networks
Public Intellectual and Media Commentary
Assessment: Contributions, Critiques, and Legacy

1. Key Takeaways

Joseph Chinyong Liow is Singapore's most prominent academic authority on the intersection of Islam, nationalism, and security in Southeast Asia. Over a career spanning three decades, Liow has produced a body of scholarship that treats the region not as a peripheral theatre of global politics but as a primary site where the great contests of the modern era — between secular nationalism and religious revival, between state sovereignty and transnational ideology, between great power ambition and small-state autonomy — are fought out with particular intensity. His work is distinguished by deep empirical grounding in Malaysian and Indonesian politics, linguistic competence in Malay, and a commitment to treating Islamist movements as rational political actors rather than pathological deviations.
His first major monograph, The Politics of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations (2005), established the analytical template that would define his career: a refusal to accept surface-level explanations for complex bilateral dynamics. Where conventional accounts attributed Indonesia-Malaysia tensions to personality clashes or historical grievances, Liow demonstrated that the relationship was structured by competing conceptions of Malay identity, sovereignty, and regional leadership — a "one kin, two nations" problem in which shared ethnicity paradoxically deepened rather than mitigated interstate rivalry. This framework anticipated by nearly two decades the current scholarly interest in how civilisational and ethnic affinities can generate conflict rather than cooperation.
Liow's Piety and Politics (2009) offered the most sophisticated English-language account of how Malaysia's ruling UMNO and the Islamic opposition party PAS competed for religious legitimacy. He argued that Malaysia's Islamisation was not primarily a story of radical infiltration but of competitive state-building, in which both parties instrumentalised Islam to claim political authority. This analysis challenged both the Western tendency to treat Islamism as inherently threatening and the Malaysian government's own narrative that it had successfully contained religious extremism through its model of "moderate Islam."
His 2016 book Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia represented a career synthesis, arguing that the relationship between religious identity and national identity in the region was neither the harmonious pluralism that ASEAN rhetoric suggested nor the civilisational clash that post-9/11 Western commentary feared. Instead, Liow showed that religion and nationalism existed in a dynamic tension in which each appropriated the language and authority of the other — with outcomes that varied enormously depending on local institutional contexts, colonial legacies, and the strategic calculations of political elites.
On terrorism and radicalisation, Liow became one of the most authoritative voices warning about ISIS's penetration of Southeast Asia well before this became a mainstream concern. His 2014 Foreign Affairs article "ISIS Goes to Asia" sounded an early alarm that the Islamic State's appeal was not confined to the Middle East, and his subsequent Brookings Institution analyses traced how Southeast Asian fighters returned from Syria and Iraq to form new networks that exploited existing grievances in southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, and pockets of Indonesia and Malaysia.
As Dean of RSIS (the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies), Liow oversaw one of the most important institutional developments in Singapore's strategic studies ecosystem. Under his leadership, RSIS consolidated its position as Southeast Asia's preeminent security think tank, producing policy-relevant research while maintaining academic standards. His tenure represented a deliberate effort to bridge the gap between the academy and the policy establishment — a gap that in Singapore, with its tradition of government-linked research, is narrower than in most democracies but still consequential.
Liow's role as a Brookings Institution non-resident fellow has made him one of the most visible conduits between Washington's policy community and Southeast Asian security analysis. His Brookings publications on the South China Sea disputes, Indonesian maritime strategy under Jokowi, and ASEAN's response to great power competition have shaped how American policymakers understand regional dynamics. This transnational positioning — Singaporean scholar, Malaysian-focused research, American policy platform — reflects the characteristic cosmopolitanism of Singapore's strategic studies establishment.
Unlike more polemical Singaporean strategic thinkers such as Bilahari Kausikan or Kishore Mahbubani, Liow operates in a deliberately academic register. His influence is exercised not through provocative op-eds or social media interventions but through peer-reviewed scholarship, edited volumes, and institutional leadership. This has made him less publicly visible than some of his contemporaries but arguably more influential in shaping how a generation of security scholars and practitioners understand the region.
Liow's intellectual trajectory illustrates the distinctive niche that Singapore-based scholars occupy in the study of Malaysia and Indonesia: simultaneously insiders and outsiders. As a Singaporean of Chinese descent writing about Malay-Muslim politics, Liow brings the analytical detachment of an external observer combined with the linguistic and cultural fluency of someone embedded in the same regional civilisational milieu. This positionality — uncomfortable in identity-politics terms but analytically productive — has enabled him to write about sensitive topics such as Islamist mobilisation and ethnic politics with a candour that scholars based in Malaysia or Indonesia might find more difficult to sustain.

2. Biographical Formation

Early Life and Education

Joseph Chinyong Liow grew up in Singapore during the formative decades when the city-state was constructing itself as a multiracial, meritocratic society from the wreckage of merger and separation. Born into the Chinese-majority population of a state that had just extricated itself from a Malay-majority federation, Liow came of age in an environment where the relationship between ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and political loyalty was not abstract theory but lived reality. The 1964 racial riots, the trauma of separation from Malaysia in 1965, and the subsequent decades of nation-building under a PAP government acutely conscious of its Malay-Muslim minority's loyalties — all of these formed the backdrop against which Liow's intellectual interests took shape.

Liow pursued his undergraduate education in political science before proceeding to the London School of Economics (LSE) for his doctoral studies. The LSE, with its tradition of area-studies scholarship and its historical connections to decolonisation debates, provided a formative intellectual environment. His doctoral research focused on Indonesia-Malaysia relations, a topic that allowed him to combine his interest in comparative politics with deep fieldwork in two of Southeast Asia's most complex polities. The choice of topic was itself revealing: rather than studying Singapore directly — the default for many Singaporean scholars — Liow chose to examine the two large Malay-Muslim-majority states that formed Singapore's immediate strategic environment. This outward orientation, studying the neighbourhood rather than the home, would become a defining characteristic of his career.

The LSE and the Michael Leifer Legacy

At the LSE, Liow studied under the supervision of scholars steeped in the British tradition of international relations and Southeast Asian area studies. The LSE's Department of International Relations had long been a centre for the study of Southeast Asian security, and its approach — empirically grounded, historically informed, sceptical of grand theory — left a deep imprint on Liow's scholarly method.

The intellectual figure who loomed largest over this tradition was Michael Leifer (1933–2001), the LSE's pre-eminent scholar of Southeast Asian international relations, whose death in 2001 marked the end of an era in the field. Leifer's influence on Liow was profound. Leifer had pioneered the study of ASEAN as a security institution, written definitive works on Indonesian and Singaporean foreign policy, and maintained a relentless focus on the gap between ASEAN's rhetorical aspirations and its operational realities. His intellectual hallmarks — precision of language, suspicion of ideological enthusiasm, attention to the structural constraints on small states — became Liow's hallmarks as well.

Liow's co-editorship (with Ralf Emmers) of Order and Security in Southeast Asia: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer (2006) was not merely a tribute but an intellectual manifesto. The volume assembled scholars who had been shaped by Leifer's approach and sought to extend it into the post-9/11 era, when the study of Southeast Asian security was being transformed by the "war on terror" and by China's growing assertiveness. Liow's own contribution to the volume — and his subsequent career — can be read as an effort to carry forward Leifer's tradition of rigorous, empirically grounded security analysis while expanding its scope to encompass the religious and ideational dimensions of regional politics that Leifer himself had treated more sparingly.

Return to Singapore and the RSIS Ecosystem

After completing his PhD, Liow returned to Singapore and joined the faculty of what would become the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). RSIS, established in its current form in 2007 as an evolution of the earlier Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), was Singapore's most ambitious effort to create a world-class think tank and graduate school focused on international relations and security studies. Named after Singapore's founding foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, the school embodied the PAP government's conviction that a small state's survival depended not only on military capability and economic competitiveness but on intellectual infrastructure — the capacity to understand and anticipate regional developments.

Liow's appointment at RSIS placed him at the nexus of Singapore's distinctive model of policy-academic relations, in which the boundary between scholarly research and government advisory work is deliberately blurred. Unlike the American model, where think tanks and universities maintain at least a formal separation from the policy establishment, Singapore's strategic studies ecosystem operates on the assumption that scholarship should serve national interests — not in the crude sense of propaganda, but in the deeper sense that rigorous analysis of the region is itself a strategic asset for a small, vulnerable state.

This institutional context shaped both the opportunities and the constraints of Liow's career. It gave him access to policymakers, classified briefings, and Track 1.5 diplomacy forums that most academics can only observe from a distance. It also meant that his scholarship existed in a zone where the line between academic analysis and policy advocacy was sometimes ambiguous — a condition that Liow navigated with more subtlety than some of his colleagues, maintaining a recognisably academic voice even when writing for policy audiences.

3. Complete Bibliography and Major Works

Monographs

Joseph Chinyong Liow's published output is anchored by three major monographs, each of which represents a distinct phase in his intellectual development:

1. The Politics of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: One Kin, Two Nations (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005)

This debut monograph, developed from his LSE doctoral dissertation, examined the paradox at the heart of Indonesia-Malaysia relations: why two states that share ethnic, linguistic, and religious affinities — both majority-Malay, both predominantly Muslim, both heirs to the Malay Archipelago's cultural traditions — have experienced persistent bilateral tensions, periodic crises, and a deep structural rivalry. Liow argued that the very closeness of the two nations' ethnic and cultural foundations made their political differences more, not less, explosive. Disputes over sovereignty in Borneo, competing claims to Malay cultural patrimony, and divergent post-colonial state-building trajectories combined to create a relationship characterised by what Liow called "fraternal rivalry." The book drew on extensive archival research in both countries and interviews with officials and politicians on both sides of the Strait of Malacca.

2. Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Oxford University Press, 2009)

This book established Liow as one of the foremost scholars of political Islam in Southeast Asia. It traced how both UMNO (the United Malays National Organisation, Malaysia's long-ruling party) and PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, the Islamic opposition party) competed to claim religious legitimacy in Malaysian politics. Liow's central argument was that Malaysia's Islamisation was driven not by grassroots radicalisation but by elite competition — a "piety race" in which UMNO and PAS each sought to outdo the other in demonstrating Islamic credentials, with cascading effects on governance, law, and social policy. The book was notable for its nuanced treatment of PAS, which Liow refused to reduce to a monolithic "Islamist threat," instead showing the party's internal divisions between pragmatists and ideologues.

3. Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

The most ambitious of Liow's works, this book extended his analysis beyond Malaysia to encompass the entire region, examining how religious identity and nationalist ideology intersect in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Myanmar. Liow argued against both the secularisation thesis (which held that modernisation would marginalise religion) and the clash-of-civilisations thesis (which treated religious conflict as inherent and inevitable). Instead, he showed that religion and nationalism were mutually constitutive: political elites mobilised religious identity to bolster national narratives, while religious movements appropriated nationalist rhetoric to enhance their political authority. The book's comparative scope and theoretical ambition marked Liow's transition from a country specialist to a regional authority.

Edited Volumes and Reference Works

Liow has co-edited or edited several significant volumes:

Order and Security in Southeast Asia: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer (with Ralf Emmers, Routledge, 2006) — a foundational collection that defined the post-Leifer agenda in Southeast Asian security studies.
Islam in Southeast Asia: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (with Nadirsyah Hosen, Routledge, 2010) — a four-volume reference collection assembling the most important scholarship on Islam in the region.
Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia, 4th edition (Routledge, 2014) — a comprehensive reference work that Liow inherited and substantially updated from earlier editions, reflecting changes in the region's political landscape since the Asian financial crisis.

Policy Papers and Journal Articles

Beyond his monographs, Liow has produced a steady stream of policy-relevant articles and papers. Notable among these are his contributions to Foreign Affairs, the Brookings Institution's Order from Chaos blog, RSIS Commentaries, and various academic journals including the Australian Journal of International Affairs, Asian Security, and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. His policy writing is characterised by a deliberate effort to translate academic findings into actionable intelligence for policymakers — a skill that reflects his institutional positioning at RSIS and Brookings.

4. Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: The Architecture of Fraternal Rivalry

The "One Kin, Two Nations" Thesis

The argument at the heart of Liow's first monograph — that ethnic and cultural affinity between Indonesia and Malaysia generates conflict rather than cooperation — was both counterintuitive and analytically powerful. In the conventional wisdom of international relations, shared identity is a source of solidarity: states that are culturally similar should, all else being equal, cooperate more readily than states that are culturally distant. Liow systematically dismantled this assumption for the Indonesia-Malaysia case.

His argument operated on several levels. First, he showed that the concept of "Malay" itself was contested between the two states. In Malaysia, "Malay" was a constitutionally defined racial category tied to specific legal privileges under the New Economic Policy and the Bumiputera system. In Indonesia, "Malay" was an ethnic category subsumed under the broader national identity of Indonesian citizenship, with no special constitutional status. These divergent constructions of Malayness meant that when Malaysia claimed to speak for the "Malay world" (Dunia Melayu), Indonesia perceived this as an affront to its own sovereignty over its Malay populations — particularly in Sumatra, Kalimantan, and the Riau Islands.

Second, Liow demonstrated that the bilateral relationship was structured by a persistent asymmetry of size and status. Indonesia, as the largest country in Southeast Asia by population and territory, regarded itself as the natural leader of the Malay Archipelago and of ASEAN more broadly. Malaysia's assertive foreign policy — particularly under Mahathir Mohamad — challenged this self-image, generating Indonesian resentment that erupted periodically in diplomatic crises, border disputes, and even popular violence against Malaysian symbols and citizens.

Third, and most originally, Liow showed how the colonial legacy had created competing state-building narratives that made reconciliation difficult. Dutch colonialism in Indonesia and British colonialism in Malaysia had produced fundamentally different political systems, legal traditions, and conceptions of citizenship. The post-colonial states inherited these differences and deepened them through divergent choices about economic policy, ethnic relations, and Islamic governance. By the time Liow was writing, Indonesia and Malaysia were in many respects more different than they had been at independence — despite sharing the same language family, the same dominant religion, and many of the same cultural practices.

Konfrontasi and Its Long Shadow

Liow's analysis of Indonesia-Malaysia relations necessarily engaged with the history of Konfrontasi (1963–1966), the armed confrontation launched by Sukarno's Indonesia against the formation of the Malaysian federation. Liow situated Konfrontasi not as an aberration but as the most extreme expression of the structural tensions he identified. Sukarno's opposition to Malaysia was driven by a genuine conviction that the federation was a British neocolonial project designed to encircle Indonesia, but it was also animated by a deeper anxiety about competing Malay polities. The resolution of Konfrontasi through Suharto's New Order did not eliminate these anxieties; it merely suppressed them, and they resurfaced periodically in disputes over Sipadan and Ligitan, the treatment of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia, and competing claims to cultural heritage (the so-called "cultural wars" over batik, rendang, and folk songs).

For Singapore's strategic community, Liow's analysis carried particular significance. Singapore had been born in the crucible of Konfrontasi and separation, and its national security doctrine was premised on the assumption that relations with both Malaysia and Indonesia would always be structurally difficult. Liow's work provided academic underpinning for what Singaporean policymakers had long understood intuitively: that the neighbourhood was not a zone of natural solidarity but a arena of competing nationalisms in which Singapore's smallness, Chinese-majority demographics, and wealth made it permanently vulnerable.

The Ambalat Crisis and Beyond

Liow's analysis proved prescient in 2005, the year his book was published, when Indonesia and Malaysia came to the brink of armed conflict over the Ambalat maritime block in the Celebes Sea. Indonesian naval vessels confronted Malaysian ships in what became the most serious bilateral military crisis in decades. Liow's framework — emphasising structural rivalry, competing sovereignty claims, and the domestic political incentives for nationalist posturing — provided a more adequate explanation for the crisis than ad hoc accounts focused on oil exploration rights or bureaucratic miscommunication. The Ambalat episode vindicated Liow's central claim that Indonesia-Malaysia relations were characterised by a persistent, structurally rooted tension that could escalate rapidly despite — or even because of — the two countries' ethnic and cultural closeness.

5. Islam and Politics in Malaysia: The Piety-Power Nexus

The Argument of Piety and Politics

Liow's second monograph, Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (2009), was published at a moment when Western understanding of political Islam was still heavily shaped by the post-9/11 framework of "moderates versus extremists." The dominant narrative in Washington, London, and other Western capitals held that the Muslim world was engaged in an intra-civilisational struggle between moderate, pro-Western Muslims and radical, anti-Western Islamists, and that Western policy should support the moderates against the radicals. Malaysia was frequently cited as a success story in this narrative — a Muslim-majority country that combined democratic governance, economic development, and what its leaders called "civilisational Islam" (Islam Hadhari).

Liow's book systematically complicated this picture. He argued that the binary of moderate versus radical Islam was analytically useless for understanding Malaysian politics, because it obscured the central dynamic: not a struggle between secularism and Islamism, but a competition between two Islamist projects. UMNO, the ruling party, was not a secular party that happened to govern a Muslim-majority country; it was a party that had deliberately and progressively Islamised the Malaysian state, bureaucracy, and legal system since the early 1980s under Mahathir Mohamad's leadership. PAS, the opposition Islamic party, was not a radical insurgent force but a sophisticated political organisation with its own internal tensions between ulama-led factionalism and professional-class reformism.

The result was what Liow called a "piety race" — a competitive dynamic in which each party sought to demonstrate greater Islamic authenticity than the other. UMNO responded to PAS's challenge not by defending secularism but by deepening Islamisation: expanding the authority of shariah courts, increasing government spending on Islamic education and institutions, sending more students to study in the Middle East, and promoting an official Islamic banking sector. PAS, in turn, escalated its demands — calling for the implementation of hudud (Islamic criminal penalties), opposing what it saw as UMNO's superficial or cosmetic Islam, and positioning itself as the authentic voice of the ummah.

Implications for the "Moderate Islam" Narrative

Liow's analysis had profound implications for Western policy. If Malaysia's Islamisation was driven not by radical infiltration but by mainstream political competition, then the standard Western prescription — support the moderates — was incoherent, because there were no significant secular forces in Malaysian politics to support. Both major Malay parties were Islamist in orientation; they differed not on whether Islam should govern public life but on which version of Islam should prevail and which party should control the process.

This argument also challenged the Malaysian government's own narrative. Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's promotion of Islam Hadhari (Civilisational Islam) after 2003 was presented to international audiences as evidence that Malaysia offered a model of moderate, development-oriented Islam compatible with globalisation and pluralism. Liow showed that Islam Hadhari was less a coherent theology than a political branding exercise — an attempt by UMNO to recapture religious legitimacy from PAS without actually reversing the Islamisation of state institutions that had occurred under Mahathir.

The Internal Politics of PAS

One of the most valuable contributions of Piety and Politics was its detailed analysis of PAS's internal dynamics. Western commentary typically treated PAS as a monolithic "Islamist party," but Liow showed that the party was riven by factional tensions between the ulama (religious scholars) who controlled the party's spiritual leadership and the younger, professionally educated members who sought to modernise PAS's appeal. This division had strategic consequences: when PAS's pragmatic faction gained influence, the party proved willing to form coalitions with secular opposition parties (as in the Barisan Alternatif of 1999 or the Pakatan Rakyat of 2008); when the ulama faction dominated, PAS retreated to its core religious constituency and pursued a more purist Islamic agenda.

Liow traced these factional dynamics through the turbulent politics of the Reformasi era, when Anwar Ibrahim's sacking as Deputy Prime Minister in 1998 created an opposition coalition that briefly united PAS, the secular-nationalist Democratic Action Party (DAP), and Anwar's new Parti Keadilan Nasional. The coalition's eventual collapse illustrated Liow's broader point about the structural difficulty of sustaining ideologically diverse opposition movements in a system where Islam had become the primary currency of political legitimacy.

Singapore Implications

For a Singaporean audience — and for the Singapore government in particular — Liow's analysis of Malaysian Islamisation carried urgent strategic implications. Singapore shares a causeway and a deeply intertwined economy with Malaysia, and the trajectory of Malaysian religious politics directly affects Singapore's Malay-Muslim minority. The fear that Malaysia's Islamisation might radicalise Singaporean Muslims — or, conversely, that Singaporean Muslims might feel increasingly alienated from a secular state surrounded by Islamising neighbours — has been a persistent concern of Singapore's security establishment. Liow's work provided the analytical tools to understand this dynamic without resorting to either alarmism or complacency.

6. Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia: A Regional Synthesis

Comparative Framework

Liow's third monograph, Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (2016), represented his most ambitious intellectual project: a comparative analysis of how religious identity and nationalist ideology intersect across the five most religiously diverse states in Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Myanmar. The book's central argument was that religion and nationalism in the region existed in a relationship of mutual constitution: each appropriated the rhetoric, symbols, and institutional resources of the other, producing hybrid formations that defied simple categorisation as either "secular nationalism" or "religious fundamentalism."

In Indonesia, Liow traced how the Pancasila state ideology — which mandates belief in God without specifying which God — had created a framework in which religion and nationalism were formally compatible but practically contested. The rise of conservative Islamic movements in post-Suharto Indonesia, the campaign to implement shariah-based local regulations (perda syariah), and the growing political influence of organisations such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) demonstrated that democratisation had not settled the relationship between religious and national identity but had reopened it.

In Thailand, Liow examined how Theravada Buddhism had been fused with Thai national identity in a way that marginalised the Malay-Muslim minority in the southern provinces. The insurgency in Patani, which had claimed over 7,000 lives since 2004, was not, in Liow's analysis, a purely religious conflict; it was a nationalist struggle in which religion served as the primary marker of ethnic difference and political grievance. Thai state attempts to resolve the conflict through Buddhist-inflected national integration (Thaification) had only deepened the sense of alienation among southern Muslims.

In Myanmar, Liow analysed the toxic fusion of Theravada Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment that would eventually culminate in the Rohingya crisis. Writing before the full-scale military operations of 2017, Liow identified the structural conditions — a military establishment that instrumentalised religious nationalism, a monastic sangha that provided ideological legitimacy for anti-Muslim violence, and a democratic transition that created new political incentives for majoritarian mobilisation — that made large-scale persecution of Muslims increasingly likely.

In the Philippines, Liow examined the Moro independence movement in Mindanao, tracing how a conflict rooted in colonial-era land dispossession had been progressively Islamised through contact with international jihadist networks, while simultaneously being addressed through a peace process that culminated in the Bangsamoro Organic Law of 2018.

Theoretical Contribution

The book's theoretical contribution lay in its rejection of both the secularisation thesis and the primordialist thesis. Against secularisation theory, Liow demonstrated that economic modernisation and political development in Southeast Asia had not diminished the salience of religion but had transformed and in many cases intensified it. Against primordialism, he showed that religious identities were not fixed essences but politically constructed categories that were mobilised, contested, and reshaped by strategic actors. This positioned Liow squarely in the constructivist tradition in international relations and comparative politics, but with a level of empirical detail that gave his theoretical claims a concreteness often lacking in constructivist work.

7. Terrorism, Radicalisation, and the ISIS Challenge in Southeast Asia

Early Work on Jihadist Networks

Liow's engagement with terrorism studies predated the rise of ISIS. His 2004 article "Exigency or Expediency? Contextualising Political Islam and the Challenge of Terrorism in Southeast Asia" was an early effort to push back against the post-9/11 tendency to conflate political Islam with terrorism. Liow argued that the Southeast Asian jihadist threat — represented primarily by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which carried out the 2002 Bali bombings — was real but needed to be understood in its local context rather than simply as an extension of al-Qaeda's global jihad. JI's operatives had their own grievances, their own organisational dynamics, and their own strategic calculations, which sometimes aligned with al-Qaeda's agenda and sometimes diverged from it.

His 2006 East-West Center policy study on "Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines" extended this contextual approach to two of the region's most persistent insurgencies. Liow demonstrated that the insurgencies in Patani and Mindanao were driven primarily by local grievances — ethnic marginalisation, historical dispossession, and the failure of central governments to deliver justice and development — and that their connection to transnational jihadist networks was opportunistic rather than organic. External jihadist organisations provided funding, training, and ideological frameworks, but the insurgencies' roots lay in specific, historically conditioned local conflicts.

The ISIS Alarm

Liow's most influential policy intervention came in 2014, when he published "ISIS Goes to Asia" in Foreign Affairs. At a time when ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) was primarily understood as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, Liow argued that the group's sophisticated propaganda, its declaration of a caliphate, and its active recruitment of foreign fighters were finding receptive audiences in Southeast Asia. He estimated that several hundred Southeast Asians — from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore — had travelled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS, and warned that their eventual return would pose severe security challenges.

The article was prescient. In the years following its publication, ISIS-linked plots were uncovered in Malaysia (including a planned attack on Putrajaya in 2016), Indonesian authorities arrested dozens of ISIS sympathisers, and the 2017 siege of Marawi in the southern Philippines — in which ISIS-affiliated militants held the city for five months — demonstrated that the group's reach in Southeast Asia was not hypothetical. Liow's subsequent Brookings analyses, including "ISIS in the Pacific" (2015) and "Malaysia's ISIS Conundrum" (2015), provided granular assessments of how ISIS exploited existing networks, including remnants of JI, to establish a Southeast Asian presence.

Analytical Distinctiveness

What distinguished Liow's terrorism analysis from the more alarmist commentary that proliferated after each attack was his insistence on disaggregating the threat. He argued consistently that "terrorism in Southeast Asia" was not a single phenomenon but a collection of distinct movements with different organisational structures, different motivations, and different levels of capability. The JI veteran network in Indonesia was different from the Maute Group in the Philippines; the individual radicalised through online propaganda in Malaysia was different from the insurgent fighter in Patani. Treating them as a single "jihadist threat" led to misguided policy responses — either overreaction (surveillance and repression that alienated Muslim communities) or complacency (assuming that the elimination of one network neutralised the broader threat).

8. Great Power Competition and ASEAN Centrality

The South China Sea and Strategic Architecture

In addition to his core expertise on Islam and terrorism, Liow has been a significant voice on the broader strategic dynamics of Southeast Asia, particularly the challenges posed by great power competition. His Brookings publications on the South China Sea, ASEAN's strategic architecture, and Indonesia's maritime ambitions under Jokowi have contributed to Washington's understanding of how Southeast Asian states perceive and respond to the US-China rivalry.

Liow's 2016 Brookings analysis of the South China Sea arbitration ruling — in which the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled overwhelmingly in favour of the Philippines and against China's expansive maritime claims — was notable for its emphasis on the ruling's limited practical impact. While many Western commentators celebrated the ruling as a vindication of the rules-based international order, Liow argued that China's refusal to accept the ruling, combined with the inability of any actor to enforce it, meant that the strategic dynamics in the South China Sea would be shaped by power rather than law. This assessment — characteristically sober, characteristically realist — reflected the Singapore strategic studies tradition's deep scepticism about the efficacy of international legal mechanisms in the absence of political will and military capability.

ASEAN's Dilemma

On ASEAN, Liow has articulated a position broadly consistent with the Singapore establishment view but with his own scholarly nuances. He has defended the concept of "ASEAN centrality" — the idea that ASEAN should remain the primary platform for regional security dialogue — while acknowledging its limitations. His argument is that ASEAN centrality is valuable not because ASEAN is an effective security organisation (it manifestly is not) but because the alternatives — a Sino-centric regional order, an American-led alliance system, or a chaotic multipolar free-for-all — would all be worse for Southeast Asian states. ASEAN centrality, in this view, is a second-best solution that preserves Southeast Asian agency in a region where the first-best solution (a robust, enforceable collective security system) is unattainable.

Liow has also written perceptively on Indonesia's evolving role as ASEAN's largest member. His co-authored 2014 Brookings paper with Vibhanshu Shekhar on Indonesia's "Global Maritime Fulcrum" strategy under Jokowi examined how Indonesia sought to redefine its national identity from a continental to a maritime power, with implications for ASEAN cohesion, South China Sea dynamics, and the broader Indo-Pacific strategic architecture. Liow noted that Jokowi's maritime vision, while rhetorically ambitious, faced significant implementation challenges — including bureaucratic fragmentation, inadequate naval capabilities, and the persistent gap between Indonesian strategic aspirations and operational capacity.

9. Singapore-Malaysia Relations: The View from the Academy

A Sensitive Subject

For any Singapore-based scholar, writing about Malaysia is an exercise in navigating sensitivities. The bilateral relationship is Singapore's most consequential — more important, in day-to-day terms, than the relationship with either the United States or China — and it is also its most emotionally fraught. Separation in 1965 left scars that have never fully healed; disputes over water supply, airspace, maritime boundaries, the Pedra Branca sovereignty case, the Johor Bahru-Singapore railway lands, and the treatment of ethnic minorities on both sides of the causeway ensure that the relationship is in a state of permanent low-level friction punctuated by periodic crises.

Liow's work on Indonesia-Malaysia relations provided indirect but valuable illumination of the Singapore-Malaysia dynamic. His "one kin, two nations" framework — the idea that ethnic and cultural affinity generates rivalry rather than solidarity — applies with equal force to the Singapore-Malaysia relationship, where shared history, intertwined families, and overlapping cultural practices coexist with deep mutual suspicion. Singapore's Chinese-majority demographics, its wealth, and its authoritarian efficiency are sources of both admiration and resentment in Malaysia; Malaysia's Malay-Muslim identity, its territorial size, and its control of Singapore's water supply are sources of both dependence and anxiety in Singapore.

Liow's scholarly treatment of Malaysian politics — particularly his work on UMNO's Islamisation programme and PAS's political strategies — has provided Singapore's strategic community with a sophisticated analytical lens through which to understand the trajectory of its most important neighbour. His refusal to reduce Malaysian politics to a simple "moderate versus radical" binary, and his insistence on the structural drivers of Islamisation, have informed the more nuanced assessments produced by Singapore's intelligence and foreign policy establishments.

The Malay Challenge

Liow has also engaged directly, if more sparingly, with the internal dynamics of Singapore's own Malay-Muslim community. His co-authored work with Amalina Anuar on "The Malay Challenge and Race Relations in Singapore" examined how the community navigated its position as a minority in a Chinese-majority state that bordered two Malay-majority nations. The analysis addressed the persistent tension between the PAP government's insistence on meritocracy and the Malay community's experience of structural disadvantage — a tension that the government has managed through a combination of self-help programmes (Mendaki), military conscription policies that have evolved over time, and a public discourse that frames Malay underperformance as a cultural challenge rather than a structural one.

10. Institution-Building: RSIS and the Professionalisation of Strategic Studies

Dean of RSIS

Liow's appointment as Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies marked a significant phase in both his career and the institution's development. RSIS had grown from the small Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), established in 1996, into one of Asia's most prominent security think tanks, with research programmes covering terrorism and political violence, maritime security, non-traditional security threats, multilateral diplomacy, and country-specific analysis across the Indo-Pacific.

As Dean, Liow oversaw an institution that embodied Singapore's distinctive approach to the production of strategic knowledge. RSIS operates as both a graduate school (offering Master's and PhD programmes in strategic studies and international relations) and a policy research institute, with its researchers expected to produce both peer-reviewed scholarship and policy-relevant commentary. This dual mandate — unusual by the standards of either pure academia or pure think tanks — reflects the Singapore government's conviction that strategic knowledge should be both rigorous and actionable.

Under Liow's leadership, RSIS expanded its international partnerships, deepened its engagement with ASEAN counterparts, and strengthened its counterterrorism research programme — the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) — which had become one of the most important sources of intelligence analysis on jihadist networks in Southeast Asia. Liow's own expertise in terrorism and radicalisation gave him particular credibility in overseeing this programme, and his academic reputation helped RSIS maintain its standing in international scholarly networks.

Liow's subsequent appointment as Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CoHASS) at NTU represented a broadening of his institutional portfolio beyond security studies. CoHASS encompasses disciplines ranging from history and philosophy to linguistics, sociology, and art history — a far wider ambit than the focused security studies mandate of RSIS. The appointment reflected NTU's recognition that Liow's combination of scholarly credibility, institutional management experience, and policy connections made him an effective academic leader beyond his specific disciplinary expertise.

The move also illustrated a broader trend in Singapore's academic landscape: the blurring of boundaries between the humanities, social sciences, and policy-oriented research. Under successive government initiatives to promote "translational" research — scholarship that has direct policy or social relevance — Singapore's universities have increasingly sought leaders who can bridge the gap between traditional academic disciplines and the government's pragmatic, solutions-oriented approach to knowledge production.

Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

In October 2025, Liow made the most consequential institutional move of his career, leaving NTU after twenty-eight years to become the third Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) at the National University of Singapore. He succeeded Danny Quah, who had served as Dean from 2018 to mid-2025, and Associate Professor Leong Ching, who served as Acting Dean during the transition period from July 2025. Liow also assumed the Wang Gungwu Professorship in East Asian Affairs — a named chair that symbolically connected him to one of Singapore's most distinguished historians of the Chinese diaspora and Southeast Asian civilisation (see SG-H-THINK-09).

The appointment placed Liow in the lineage of LKYSPP's previous deans: Kishore Mahbubani (2004–2017), who built the school from scratch and gave it a global profile through his own celebrity as a public intellectual, and Danny Quah, who brought quantitative rigour and a focus on the political economy of Asia's rise. Liow brought a different set of strengths — deep empirical expertise on Southeast Asian security and Muslim politics, extensive institutional leadership experience across three NTU units, and a network of policy connections stretching from Brookings to ASEAN defence establishments.

The LKYSPP deanship represents a pivot from security studies to the broader field of public policy — a transition that mirrors Singapore's own evolving challenges. As the city-state confronts demographic aging, climate adaptation, inequality, AI governance, and the restructuring of the global order, the school requires a leader who can bridge the traditional security-focused lens of Singapore's strategic community with the wider governance challenges that define the twenty-first century. Liow's appointment signals NUS's bet that a scholar steeped in the realities of Southeast Asian politics — its ethnic complexity, its religious dynamics, its authoritarian resilience, and its democratic experiments — is best positioned to lead a school training the next generation of Asian public policy leaders.

11. The Brookings Connection and Transnational Policy Networks

Non-Resident Fellow

Liow's appointment as a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution — America's oldest and arguably most prestigious think tank — positioned him as a key interlocutor between Southeast Asian security expertise and Washington's policy community. Brookings' Foreign Policy programme, and particularly its Center for East Asia Policy Studies, has been one of the primary channels through which American policymakers access scholarship on Southeast Asia, and Liow's presence in this network ensured that Singapore-based perspectives on regional security were represented in Washington's policy debates.

His Brookings publications covered a deliberately wide range of topics: ISIS in Southeast Asia, the South China Sea ruling, Indonesia's maritime strategy, Malaysia's political trajectory, and ASEAN's institutional challenges. This breadth was strategic — by positioning himself as a generalist authority on Southeast Asian security rather than a narrow specialist on any single topic, Liow maximised his utility to policymakers who needed accessible, reliable analysis across the full range of regional issues.

The Brookings connection also reflects a distinctive feature of Singapore's intellectual ecosystem: its orientation toward Washington. Unlike many Southeast Asian scholars, who are more likely to publish in regional journals or engage with European and Australian academic networks, Singapore-based strategic thinkers have cultivated deep ties with American think tanks — Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Carnegie Endowment, and the Council on Foreign Relations. This reflects Singapore's strategic calculus: as a small state dependent on the American security presence in Asia, maintaining intellectual connections with Washington is not merely an academic preference but a strategic imperative.

12. Public Intellectual and Media Commentary

Scholarly Voice in a Polemical Arena

Liow occupies a distinctive position in Singapore's public intellectual landscape. Unlike Bilahari Kausikan, whose combative social media presence and polemical op-eds have made him perhaps the most recognisable voice in Singapore's strategic studies community, or Kishore Mahbubani, whose deliberately provocative books and media appearances have generated both global attention and domestic controversy, Liow has maintained a deliberately academic register. His media commentary — in outlets such as The Straits Times, Channel News Asia, the South China Morning Post, and international publications — is characterised by caution, nuance, and a refusal to reduce complex issues to headline-friendly soundbites.

This approach has trade-offs. It means that Liow is less widely known among the general public than some of his more colourful contemporaries. But it also means that his analysis carries a particular kind of authority: when Liow speaks on terrorism in Southeast Asia or on the trajectory of Malaysian politics, he speaks with the accumulated credibility of decades of peer-reviewed scholarship, not with the attention-seeking energy of a social media provocateur. In a media environment that rewards sensationalism, Liow's measured voice serves as a corrective — a reminder that the most important strategic questions resist simple answers.

Media Engagement on Malaysian Politics

Liow has been particularly in demand as a commentator on Malaysian politics, especially during periods of political upheaval. The dramatic events of 2018 — when Mahathir Mohamad returned to power at the age of 92, leading an opposition coalition that defeated UMNO for the first time in Malaysian history — generated intense international interest, and Liow was one of the most frequently cited authorities explaining the significance of the result. His analysis emphasised not only the immediate political dynamics (Mahathir's personal ambition, UMNO's corruption under Najib Razak, the 1MDB scandal) but the deeper structural shifts in Malaysian politics that the result revealed — including the fragmentation of Malay-Muslim political solidarity and the growing salience of urban, multiracial coalitions.

The subsequent political turmoil — the "Sheraton Move" of 2020, which brought down the Pakatan Harapan government and returned UMNO-aligned forces to power through a parliamentary manoeuvre — further demonstrated the complexity that Liow had spent his career analysing. His commentary on these events was characterised by a refusal to moralise: where many observers framed the Sheraton Move as a betrayal of democratic principles, Liow treated it as a predictable outcome of the structural incentives in Malaysian politics, in which Malay-Muslim political actors faced overwhelming pressure to reunite along ethnic and religious lines.

13. Assessment: Contributions, Critiques, and Legacy

Intellectual Contributions

Joseph Chinyong Liow's scholarly contributions can be assessed on three levels. First, at the empirical level, he has produced the most comprehensive English-language body of work on the intersection of Islam, nationalism, and security in Southeast Asia. His three monographs — on Indonesia-Malaysia relations, Malaysian Islamism, and religion-nationalism dynamics across the region — constitute an integrated research programme that has set the terms for a generation of scholarship.

Second, at the analytical level, Liow has demonstrated the value of treating religious politics as rational political behaviour rather than as irrational fanaticism. His consistent refusal to pathologise Islamist movements, and his insistence on understanding them through the same analytical tools used to study any other political phenomenon — strategic calculation, organisational dynamics, institutional incentives — has been a corrective to both Western Islamophobia and the more superficial forms of "counter-extremism" analysis.

Third, at the institutional level, Liow has been one of the key architects of Singapore's strategic studies ecosystem. His leadership of RSIS and his role in building transnational policy networks through Brookings have enhanced Singapore's intellectual influence disproportionate to the city-state's size — an influence that functions as a form of soft power precisely because it is grounded in rigorous scholarship rather than propaganda.

Critiques and Limitations

No intellectual profile would be complete without acknowledging limitations. Liow's work can be criticised on several grounds. First, his position within Singapore's government-linked academic ecosystem means that his scholarship, while analytically sophisticated, operates within certain implicit boundaries. His work on Malaysian Islamisation, for example, is analytically rigorous in its treatment of UMNO and PAS but less probing when it comes to Singapore's own management of its Malay-Muslim minority — a topic on which the Singapore government's sensitivities are acute. Whether this reflects self-censorship, strategic discretion, or simply a different research focus is a matter of interpretation, but the asymmetry is notable.

Second, Liow's deliberate academic register, while a source of credibility, can also be a limitation in terms of impact. In a world where policy influence increasingly requires media visibility, social media engagement, and the kind of provocative argumentation that generates attention, Liow's measured scholarly voice risks being drowned out by louder, less careful analysts.

Third, some critics have noted that Liow's analysis of Southeast Asian Islam, while nuanced, remains primarily focused on elite political dynamics — the strategies of parties, the calculations of leaders, the manoeuvres of factions. The grassroots dimensions of Islamic revival — the transformation of everyday piety, the spread of conservative social norms through education and social media, the experience of ordinary Muslims navigating between secular modernity and religious commitment — receive less sustained attention in his work.

Legacy and Continuing Relevance

These critiques notwithstanding, Liow's body of work constitutes one of the most important contributions to Southeast Asian security studies produced by a Singapore-based scholar. At a time when the region faces intensifying great power competition, persistent terrorism threats, rising religious nationalism, and the unresolved legacies of colonialism and Cold War-era authoritarian rule, the kind of rigorous, empirically grounded, contextually sensitive analysis that Liow exemplifies is more necessary than ever.

His career also illustrates the distinctive role that Singapore-based scholars play in the regional knowledge ecosystem. Positioned in a city-state that is simultaneously part of Southeast Asia and set apart from it — Chinese-majority in a Malay-Muslim neighbourhood, wealthy in a region of developing economies, authoritarian-efficient in a region of chaotic democracies and outright dictatorships — Singapore's scholars bring a particular perspective to the study of regional politics. Liow's work on Malaysia and Indonesia, produced from this vantage point, exemplifies both the analytical advantages and the positional tensions of this role.

As the third Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy — following Kishore Mahbubani and Danny Quah — Liow is now responsible for shaping the institution that trains Asia's next generation of public policy leaders. His appointment, after twenty-eight years at NTU spanning RSIS and CoHASS, represents both a personal culmination and a strategic choice by NUS: to place at the helm of Singapore's most prominent public policy school a scholar whose career has been defined by deep engagement with Southeast Asia's most complex political challenges. Whether that generation of policy leaders inherits Liow's combination of empirical knowledge, analytical discipline, and institutional ambition will depend in part on the intellectual infrastructure that leaders like Liow have built. The institution-building dimension of his legacy may prove as consequential as his scholarship itself.

SG-H-THINK-31 | Joseph Chinyong Liow — The Cartographer of Southeast Asian Insecurity: Islam, Nationalism, and the Politics of a Turbulent Region

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