Associate Professor Helen Nesadurai

BScHons & MSc (Malaya); MSc (Oxford); PhD (Warwick)

Helen E. S. Nesadurai is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University based on the Sunway Campus in Malaysia. Much of her research explores how the tensions between the global and the domestic are negotiated in the construction of regional governance arrangements, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. While continuing to study regional cooperation and governance through ASEAN, ASEAN Plus Three and APEC, her research increasingly explores the politics and political economy of non-state governance arrangements initiated by NGOs and/or private firms. She is especially interested in examining how these arrangements interact with state authorities in Southeast Asia, their influence on the way states govern and what that says about power, authority and sovereignty in the region. She is currently exploring these dynamics using the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a global, multi-stakeholder regulatory regime aimed at enhancing palm oil sustainability.

She is the author of Globalisation, Domestic Politics and Regionalism: The ASEAN Free Trade Area (Routledge, 2003) and the editor of Globalisation and Economic Security in East Asia: Governance and Institutions (Routledge, 2006). Her published work has also appeared in Third World Quarterly, New Political Economy, The Pacific Review, and Australian Journal of International Affairs. She is an external associate of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at Warwick University and the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University and currently serves on the editorial boards of The Pacific Review, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. She has also consulted for the ASEAN Secretariat and the Asian Development Bank.