Indo-Pacific Contributing Writer
As Pacific Polarity grows, we are looking for contributing writers to go above the news cycle, look beyond immediate crises, and contribute meaningfully to policy debates.
Current Indo-Pacific discourse suffers from two critical flaws. First, conversations overemphasize U.S.-China dimensions while relegating other actors, from Southeast Asians, Australians, and Pacific islanders to secondary roles. Second, it operates in ideological bubbles where Washington hawks rarely engage Beijing doves, and vice versa.
Dealing with these inhibitors of quality discourse, Pacific Polarity widens the aperture of debate by platforming competing visions of how the region should be governed. We provide a critical outlet that squashes the worst arguments existing only in Washington, Beijing, Jakarta, Canberra, and Singapore bubbles.
We’ve platformed defenders of the American alliance network like Mike Green and Kazuto Suzuki, prominent Chinese leaders like Zhou Bo, figures advocating hedging strategies between the United States and China like Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and Ambassador Richard Broinowski, and critical American statesmen like Evan Feigenbaum.
For a preview of our output, view our publicly available publications here: https://pacificpolarity.substack.com/
Here are some examples of topics that interest us:
Macro Trade: How Southeast Asian supply chains will be augmented due to American protectionism and Chinese trade surpluses;
Economic Coercion: Japan’s efforts to insulate its economy and minimize the impact of Chinese export controls and American tariff pressures;
Multilateralism: future of arrangements, including APEC, AUKUS, the Quad, US-Korea-Japan trilateral, ASEAN (and ASEAN+3), CPTPP, RCEP, etc.;
Security Cooperation: The nature of U.S.-Korea, -Japan, and -Australia’s defense co-production, or emerging domains of Chinese collaboration in “internal security”;
National and Sub-national Analyses: Chinese industrial policy and political reform, Vietnam’s administrative consolidation, and Indian state-level policies; and
Politics and Conflict: Electoral cycles in Southeast Asia, evolving security paradigms such as Cambodia-Thailand, and the Myanmar Civil War.
As a contributing writer, you would be expected to publish a written product of between 800 and 2,400 words at least once per month. This is a volunteer position.
To apply, submit a resume and writing sample on any topic, ideally related to our focus areas.