Amitav Acharya

Amitav Acharya (born 1962) is a scholar and author, who is Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University, Washington, D.C., where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, and serves as the chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative. Acharya has expertise in and has made contributions to a wide range of topics in International Relations, including constructivism, ASEAN and Asian regionalism, and Global International Relations. He became the first non-Western President of the International Studies Association when he was elected to the post for 2014–15.

Acharya was born in Jagatsinghpur, Orissa (now Odisha), India. After completing a BA in political science at Ravenshaw University and an MA in political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, he obtained his doctorate from Murdoch University in Australia in 1987. After brief teaching and research stints in Singapore at the Institute for Southeast Studies (now ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute) and the National University of Singapore, he joined the faculty of York University, Toronto in 1993. He was a Fellow at Harvard University's newly established Asia Center in 2000–2001, while concurrently being a Fellow of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 2001 and 2007, he served as deputy director and Head of Research at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (which in 2007 became the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies), at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In 2007, he was appointed Chair of Global Governance and Director of the Centre for Governance and International Affairs at the University of Bristol. In 2009, he moved to his present position at American University.

Acharya has held various visiting positions throughout his career, including as the ASEM Chair in Regional Integration at the University of Malaya, the Direk Jayanama Visiting Professor of Political Science at Thammasat University, Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Chulalongkorn University. He has also held visiting positions at Australian National University, Stanford University, Sydney University, United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies, Vietnam National University, Central European University, and Ritsumeikan University. He was elected to a Christensen Fellowship at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford in 2012. In 2012–13, he was appointed to the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professorship in International Relations at Rhodes University, South Africa. In 2016, he was appointed to be the Inaugural Boeing Company Chair in International Relations in the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. In 2022, he was made Professor Extraordinarius (Extraordinary Professor), University of Pretoria.

He is a recipient of the Odisha Living Legend Award (2016). He has received three ISA Distinguished Scholar Awards: in 2015 for his "contribution to non-Western IR theory and inclusion” in international studies, in 2018 for his “influence, intellectual works and mentorship” in the field of international organization. and in 2023 for his “extraordinary impact” in globalizing the study of International Relations and “mentorship of emerging scholars”.

In 2020, he received American University's highest honor: Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award.

Acharya's major research interests include the diffusion of ideas and norms in world politics, and constructivist International Relations (IR) theory more generally; comparative regionalism, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); and contributions to IR theory and practice from the Global South, or Global IR. Acharya's research combines and cuts across these different topics, often touching upon multiple themes in a single work.

Acharya's principal contributions that advance constructivist IR theory are the concepts of norm localization and norm subsidiarity. Constructivism has traditionally accorded more importance to the role of ideas and norms in international politics compared to realism and liberalism. However, Acharya points out that most constructivists conceive of ideas as spreading outward from the West (or the Global North) to the "Rest" (or the Global South). Acharya challenges this story of unidirectional norm diffusion by showing how "local" beliefs and practices also matter. Using case studies from ASEAN, Acharya highlights how Southeast Asian leaders did not just accept transnational norms as is. Rather, where such transnational norms were in line with prior local beliefs, or "cognitive priors", they were successfully "localized". This is exemplified in how the ASEAN states localized the "common security" norm of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe into "cooperative security" as manifested in the ASEAN Regional Forum. While the cooperative security norm recognized the need for inclusive regional security cooperation, it rejected the legalistic and domestic politics aspects of the common security norm, in line with the basic tenets of the ASEAN Way.

While norm localization emphasizes the agency of local actors in adapting prevailing transnational norms, norm subsidiarity is concerned with the creation of new norms by local actors. Norm subsidiarity posits that local actors create new norms and rules with a view toward protecting the norm's autonomy from violation and abuse at the international level. In contrast to localization, which is inward-looking, subsidiarity is outward-looking. Acharya again uses a case from Southeast Asia to illustrate the concept. In resistance to the US-led collective defence organization of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization signed in 1954, the leaders of South and Southeast Asia met at the Bandung Conference in 1955 and established their support for the norm of collective defence but rejected the use of such an arrangement for the defence of a single country. In so doing, the leaders at Bandung not only rejected the central position of the United States in regional security arrangements, but also created a new norm of collective defence that accorded importance to all treaty members.