Mark R. Thompson

Mark R. Thompson (born June 8, 1960) is an expert on Southeast Asian politics, with particular interest in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. He also works on broader themes of comparative politics, particularly authoritarianism and democratization. He is professor of politics at the City University of Hong Kong, where he is currently acting head of the Department of Asian and International Studies (AIS) and director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC), both at City University of Hong Kong.^[1] Earlier he taught at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and at Glasgow University in Scotland, United Kingdom. In 2013-2014 he was president of the Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA).^[2] He has regularly appeared in the international media as a commentator on Southeast Asian politics.

Education

Thompson grew up as a Chicago native. He has a B.A. in religious studies from Brown University. He received a Baker scholarship to do postgraduate work at Cambridge University (MA in Social and Political Sciences, 1984) and Yale University (M.A.and Ph.D. in political science, 1991) where he was supervised by Juan J. Linz and James C. Scott. He was also received a Dorot foundation fellowship to attend a summer programme at Hebrew University (1980) and a Rotary Foundation scholarship to enroll in the political science MA programme at the University of the Philippines, Diliman (1984–85). In 1983 he studied German at the Goethe Institut, Boppard and in 1988 he studied Tagalog (Filipino) at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Academic career

He taught in various universities in Germany for nearly two decades, including the University of Münster (1990-1991), the Federal Army University (Bundeswehr Universität), 1992) in Munich, the Dresden University of Technology (Technische Universität Dresden), 1993-1995), and the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (1997-2010). He taught in the politics department at the University of Glasgow in Scotland from 1995 to 1997. He is currently teaching at City University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, China. He has been a visitor at various universities around the world including Thammasat and Chulalongkorn universities in Thailand, De la Salle and Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, The University of California, Berkeley, The University for Peace, Costa Rica and Keio University, Japan (the latter two as invited visiting professor). He was Lee Kong Chian distinguished visiting fellow for Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore in autumn 2008 and, in spring 2009, at Stanford University.

Academic work

Thompson started his career as specialist on the Philippines where he spent three years in the second half of the 1980s doing field research on the opposition to Marcos which he published as The Anti-Marcos Struggle (1995). He has continued to write frequently on Philippine politics and is currently working on a book project about the Philippine presidency with Julio C Teehankee, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, De la Salle University. He was keynote speaker at the Philippine Political Science Association (PPSA) Annual Conference, 10–11 April 2014.

He also works on politics in various Southeast Asia countries in comparative perspective. Together with William C Case he was awarded a major General Research Fund Hong Kong government grant ‘Democracy and its Discontents in Southeast Asia’ in July 2013.

In the 1990s he worked on Eastern Europe, former East Germany in particular, as part of his comparative interest in ‘democratic revolutions’.

He completed a major German Research Foundation (DFG) project about dynastic female leaders in Asia in which he co-edited a volume published in German (2004) and in English (2013). He has written on the ‘Asian values’ debate as well as on the influence of the ‘Singapore model’ on China and is currently finishing a book project on ‘authoritarian modernism’ in East Asia.

Selected bibliography^[3]

• The Anti-Marcos Struggle. Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-300-06243-5.
• Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 2004, ISBN 978-0-415-40682-6.
• (co-edited with Claudia Derichs) Frauen an der Macht. Dynastien und politische Führerinnen in Asien, Passau: Univ. Passau, 2005, ISBN 3-933509-29-7.
• (co-edited with Claudia Derichs) Dynasties and Female Political Leaders in Asia: Gender, Power and Pedigree, Berlin/London: LIT Verlag, 2013. ISBN 9783643903204.
• (co-edited with Verena Bleichinger and Christina Frantz) Politik in Japan: System, Reformprozesse und Aussenpolitik in internationaler Vergleich (Politics in Japan: System, Reform Processes and Foreign Policy in International Comparative Perspective) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), ISBN 3593379988.
• “The Politics Philippine Presidents Make: Presidential Style, Patronage-based or Regime Relational?” Critical Asian Studies, 46, no. 3 (September 2014), pp. 433-460.
• (with Stephan Ortmann), “China's Obsession with Singapore: Learning Authoritarian Modernity,” with Stephan Ortmann, Pacific Review, 27, issue 3, (May 2014), pp. 433-55
• “Populism and the Revival of Reform: Competing Narratives in the Philippines,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, 31, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–28.
• “Japan’s German Path and Pacific Asia’s Flying Geese,” Asian Journal of Social Science, 38, no. 5 (2010), pp. 697–715.
• (with Philipp Kuntz) “More than the Final Straw: Stolen Elections as Revolutionary Triggers,” Comparative Politics, 41, no. 3 (April 2009), pp. 253–272.) (Munich: Allitera, 2007).
• “Whatever Happened to 'Asian Values'?” Journal of Democracy, 12, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 154–165.
• “Late Industrialisers, Late Democratisers: Developmental States in the Asia-Pacific,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (December 1996), pp. 625–647.
• "Why and How East Germans Rebelled,” Theory and Society, vol. 25, no. 2 (April 1996), pp. 263–299.

References