I have served as a Professor of Political Geography at NUS since January 2012. Previously I was Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam and prior to that a Professor of Human Geography at Plymouth University, UK. During the 1990s, I was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.
My main research interests are:
1. Political geography and geopolitics, especially of cities, states and conflicts.
2. The history and philosophy of geography.
Bringing these together is an enduring fascination with the connections between geography and area studies.
See for example: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816656520
Since 2017, this interest in the intersections of geography and area studies led me (with my NUS colleagues Shaun Lin and Chih Yuan Woon and others elsewhere) to study the consequences and reception of China's "Belt and Road" Initiative (BRI). This yielded two papers in the The Professional Geographer (2017 and 2019). Both can be downloaded below.
Other publications on this theme include special sections on financing BRI, published in Eurasian Geography and Economics, on politics and spaces of the BRI, published in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and on the BRI as method, published in Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. The introduction to each set can be downloaded below along with a sample of other publications.
From 2005-2017 I was an Associate Editor of Political Geography:
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/political-geography
I am currently co-Editor of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679493
My CV (available below) lists all of my publications and editorial service.
Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ASVu7WkAAAAJ&hl=en
At NUS (and elsewhere) I have taught at all levels from larger introductory classes to specialist graduate modules.
I currently teach a final year (honours) undergraduate class on Geographical Thought and a graduate seminar in Political Geography.
From 2009-2021, I worked with six other scholars on a multi-sited research project on security, life and work in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Erbil, Maputo, Phnom Penh and Yangon.
Selected papers from this work are downloadable below.
The work also yielded a 2021 book (published in the University of Georgia Press series on Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation) that was co-authored with a former graduate student:
https://ugapress.org/book/9780820360607/transecting-securityscapes/
Listen to a podcast about the book here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/transecting-securityscapes
From 2017-2022, I convened a Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures, supported by the Max Weber Foundation: http://www.maxweberstiftung.de/en/ueber-uns.html
Our foci were:
Details are here: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/researchclusters/max-weber-foundation-research-group-on-borders-mobility-and-new-infrastructures.html
Building on the achievements of the former Research Group, and with ongoing support from the Max Weber Foundation, a new Research Partnership on Asian Infrastructures was established between the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at NUS and the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien (DIJ), to run from 2022-2026. I oversee this partnership with Professor Tim Bunnell at ARI
Details are here: https://ari.nus.edu.sg/research/partnerships/
In recent years, I have returned to theoretical and methodological interests at the intersections of area studies, political geographies and geopolitics, especially in the light of “decolonial” writings. Two reflections (focused on methods of “psychogeography” and critical Muslim geographies) are downloadable below. I have also been working with a former NUS graduate student and postdoc Felix Mallin (who is now based at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland) on the history of the concept of geoeconomics. Our (open access) paper on this was recently published: Mallin, F., Sidaway, J. D. (2023) Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, online early. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12600