Benjamin Zawacki is a Senior Program Specialist at the Asia Foundation, with a concentration on Southeast Asia regional security and cooperation. Since joining the Foundation in 2018, his research and analysis have focused on geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific, the Mekong subregion, US-Thai relations, foreign influence operations, and Southeast Asia’s political economies; and his project management on maritime security, foreign policy institutions, the law of the sea, and track 1.5 bilateral policy dialogues.
Benjamin is the author of Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China (Bloomsbury), which was translated into Chinese and whose second edition was released in December 2021. He is currently writing a personal history of the promise, course, and aftermath of America’s ‘unipolar moment’. He was a 2022-23 Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholar, a Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations through 2016, and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program in 2014-2015. He served as a Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and two other members of the Elders in Myanmar in 2013 and was Amnesty International’s Southeast Asia Researcher for five years through 2012. He has also worked for several UN agencies. A regular contributor to the media in Southeast Asia, he has published over 60 articles, reports, and opinion editorials.
Benjamin is a member of the New York State Bar and a graduate of the George Washington University Law School and the College of the Holy Cross.