Cheng-Chwee Kuik is a professor of international relations at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), National University of Malaysia (UKM). He is also a nonresident senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie China. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program (CWP) and a visiting research fellow at Oxford University. Professor Kuik’s research focuses on the foreign and defense policies of smaller states, Asian security, and international relations. 

Kuik’s publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as International Affairs, The Pacific Review, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Journal of Contemporary China, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. His essay “The Essence of Hedging” won the Michael Leifer Memorial Prize, awarded by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. He is coauthor (with David Lampton and Selina Ho) of Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (2020), and coeditor (with Alice Ba and Sueo Sudo) of Institutionalizing East Asia (2016).

Kuik’s current projects include hedging in international relations, domestic politics and foreign policy choices, and the geopolitics of connectivity cooperation. He serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Southeast Asia, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Asian Politics and Policy, International Journal of Asian Studies, and East Asian Policy. He also served as head of the writing team (2019–2020) for the Government of Malaysia’s inaugural Defence White Paper, and as a member of the Consultative Council on Foreign Policy, Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2023). He holds an MLitt from the University of St. Andrews and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Kuik was an event speaker at the Dialogue.