Professor Duncan McCargo

I’m now a Visiting Professor at Leeds, having been employed at the University from 1993 to 2020. During a very varied career at Leeds, I twice headed the School of Politics and International Studies, and co-supervised 30 PhD students to successful completion. Apart from Leeds, I have also held professorial appointments at the University of Copenhagen and Columbia University. I currently teach at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

I may be best known for my agenda-setting contributions to current debates on the politics of Thailand, but my work is centrally concerned with the nature of power. How do entrenched elites seek to retain power in the face of challenges from new political forces? How do challengers to state power try to undermine the legitimacy of existing regimes? These interests have led me to study questions relating to the uses of media, sub-national conflicts, and the politics of justice, among other issues.

Fascinated by Asia since my student days, I've spent several years in Thailand, and have also lived in Singapore, taught in Belfast, Cambodia and Japan, and published on Indonesia and Vietnam. As I hate repeating myself, I change research topics regularly. I am committed to doing serious fieldwork. Time magazine wrote of my work ‘No armchairs for this author… McCargo is the real McCoy.’

From 2015-2020 I held a grant from the United States Institute of Peace to examine peace messaging in Thai elections. Information about the Thai elections project and my other Thailand-related research can be found at the website https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/