Duncan McCargo is professor of global affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and also a visiting professor in 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.
Writings on Thailand
McCargo's PhD thesis, The political leadership of Major-General Chamlong Srimuang was published in a revised form as a 1997 book. Since then McCargo has published several other books on Thailand. His earlier Thai books include: Politics and the Press in Thailand (2000), a fieldwork-based study for which he spent a year embedded in the editorial rooms of several leading Thai language newspapers; Reforming Thai Politics (2002) an edited volume which has become the standard work on the political reform process of the 1990s, containing chapters by a range of leading Thai and foreign scholars and activists; and The Thaksinization of Thailand, a widely cited analysis of the politics surrounding controversial former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, co-authored with the revisionist political economist Ukrist Pathamanand.
Apart from his twelve books, McCargo has published a number of articles in journals including Critical Asian Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy and New Left Review. His writings regarding the "network monarchy", a term he coined to describe King Bhumibol Adulyadej and his proxies, particularly former Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanond, have been influential among Thai academics. His was the only journal article selected by Foreign Affairs for their seven-item list of essential reading on Thai politics.
Other McCargo articles deal critically with issues such as constitutionalism, the politics surrounding Buddhism, and the role of the military. He was critical of the 2006 and 2014 military coups in Thailand. McCargo's work forms by now a basis of Thai studies, as evidenced by his many publications, awards and appointments mentioned here. At the same time, all of McCargo's work on Thailand and Southeast Asia forms part of his larger intellectual project on the nature of power and justice, which has a broad comparative reach.
Work on the southern Thai conflict
From 2005 to 2010, McCargo worked primarily on the violent conflict affecting Thailand's southern border provinces, spending a year driving around the region and interviewing more than 270 informants. His southern Thai project produced three books: the edited collection Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence (2007), which is based on a 2006 special issue of the journal Critical Asian Studies; the research monograph Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (2008); and a second monograph, Mapping National Anxieties: Thailand's Southern Conflict in 2012. In the same year, a Thai translation of Tearing Apart the Land was published by Kobfai.
Tearing Apart the Land has been widely reviewed; Time magazine wrote, "No armchairs for this author: he researched the book by crisscrossing southern Thailand in a temperamental 1989 Mercedes, hastening back to the town of Pattani by nightfall to avoid militant booby traps. McCargo is the real McCoy."