Projects
  • Coordinating Crisis Responses: Strengthening Rules-Based Maritime Engagement in Southeast Asia (with Dr Emirza Adi Syailendra, RSIS & ANU)
    Funded by the 2025 Strategic Policy Grants Program, Coordinating Crisis Responses: Strengthening Rules-Based Maritime Engagement in Southeast Asia examines how Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam are preparing to manage potential maritime crises. The project explores three interrelated areas: developing wartime rules of engagement, shaping maritime practices through minilateral cooperation, and adapting ASEAN confidence-building measures to contemporary challenges.
    Through fieldwork, structured dialogues, and archival research, the project investigates how Southeast Asian states are seeking to supplement existing regional frameworks that do not address conduct during armed conflict. It also analyses areas of convergence and divergence in relation to Australia’s regional engagement.
    The research is co-led by Dr Emirza Adi Syailendra (Australian National University; S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore) and Professor Evelyn Goh (Australian National University), and involves collaborative activities including field interviews, focus group discussions, and policy roundtables across Southeast Asia.
  • Asia’s Security Futures: A Multidimensional Approach (with Dr Iain Henry & Dr Wai Yeap Chan, ANU)
    Funded by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s 2025 Workshops Program, Asia’s Security Futures: A Multidimensional Approach (3–4 December 2025, Australian National University, Canberra) brings together leading scholars to examine how Asia is responding to a confluence of strategic challenges. The workshop explores how regional actors are navigating China’s resurgence, rising uncertainty about American commitment, and the pressures of economic de-risking and decoupling.
    By addressing three interconnected themes—strategic influence through development, the regional implications of reactionary politics, and the evolving significance of Taiwan as a potential flashpoint—the workshop seeks to generate new insights into how security, politics, and economic dynamics intersect in shaping Asia’s future order. The discussions aim to advance interdisciplinary perspectives and foster collaborative approaches to understanding the region’s unfolding strategic landscape.
  • Indonesia's Evolving Maritime Strategy (with Dr Emirza Adi Syailendra, ANU)
    This ongoing multi-year collaborative project, launched in 2023, seeks to conceptualise and better understand Indonesia’s evolving maritime strategy amid a changing regional environment. Co-investigated by Professor Evelyn Goh and her student Emirza Syailendra, the project focuses on three main areas: Indonesia’s strategic thinking in the maritime domain; the domestic factors shaping its defence cooperation with foreign partners; and its shifting alignments with major global powers. Supported by the Commonwealth Department of Defence’s Strategic Policy Grants Program (SPGP 2023, DRN 202021-0828), the project brings together a diverse research team comprising Dr I Made Andi Arsana (Universitas Gadjah Mada), Ms Edna Pattisina (Indonesia Strategic and Defence Studies), Mr Aristyo Darmawan (Universitas Indonesia and ANU), and Mr Monty Pounder (ANU).

    Project Publications—

    ____‘SDSC-CSIS Strategic Policy Roundtable Report: Indonesia’s Maritime Strategy in the Changing Indo-Pacific Region | Jakarta, September 2024
    ____‘Conceptualizing Indonesia’s Strategic Thinking in the Maritime Domain: Strategy as a Spectrum and a Process’, AMTI, (March 2025).
    ____‘Parsing Indonesia’s Border Diplomacy Strategy,’ The Diplomat (May 2025).

    ____‘Navigating Uncertainty: Why Indonesia Needs a National Maritime Strategy’, the Diplomat (March 2025).

    ____‘Big changes off a low base: Indonesia’s military modernisation,’ The Lowy Interpreter (April 2025).
    ____‘Indonesia and Australia: Defence cooperation under Prabowo’, The Lowy Interpreter (March 2025).
  • The Infrastructure of China's Influence: Connecting Developmentalism, Nation-building, and Regime Security in Asia
    Funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (2019-2022), this project investigates how China uses infrastructure-driven development to wield international influence, by studying how Chinese ideas of ‘developmentalism’ interact with nation-building and regime security imperatives in Indonesia, Myanmar and Laos.

    Project Publications—

    Chinese Investments in Southeast Asia: Patterns and Significance (with Nan Liu)
  • Connecting Chinese Investment and Influence in Southeast Asia
    This project investigates the impacts of Chinese investment states in Southeast Asia, providing an important region-wide analysis that allows quantitative and qualitative comparisons and facilitates policy calibration and focus. It is part of the SEARBO project led by Prof. Paul Hutchcroft.

    Project Publications—

    ____

    New Mandala Report on Chinese Investment in Southeast Asia (2020).

  • A collaborative multi-year project (ongoing since 2014) that develops an original ‘Strategic Diplomacy’ model of diagnostic analysis and policy-making for complex systems problems in international relations. Prantl and Goh are creating unique cross-regional and thematic research case files of effective concepts and practice; new postgraduate education and executive training; and an extensive engagement program with global end-user communities.

    Project Publications—

    ____‘Strategic Diplomacy in Asia’, East Asia Forum Quarterly 9:2 (April-June 2017).
    ____‘Why Strategic Diplomacy Matters,’ East Asia Forum Quarterly 9:2 (April-June 2017).

    ____‘Strategic Diplomacy in Northeast Asia’, Global Asia 11:4 (Winter 2016).

  • Supported by Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grant funding, this project facilitates research into strategy and strategic policy in the Asia-Pacific; develops and delivers a suite of original Professional Education Courses for Defence; and allows innovative engagement with senior defence officials on crucial strategic challenges.

    A suite of four Executive Education short (5-day) courses designed exclusively for the Department of Defence, delivered by leading ANU scholars:
    (1) Strategic Policy for the Asia-Pacific (Evelyn Goh)
    (2) Strategic Diplomacy in Asia (Jochen Prantl & Evelyn Goh)
    (3) Chinese Security Policy-making (Amy King)
    (4) Crises and Conflicts in Contested Asia (Brendan Taylor).

    The suite is based on in-depth academic research expertise, recent scholarly publications, and prior graduate teaching experience by the specially selected team members. Subjects were developed in consultation with Strategic Policy and a range of Defence stakeholders.
  • This project investigates the changing meaning and significance of being American allies or strategic partners, in a fast-evolving international order. Academic contributors have conducted research on a dozen countries in the Asia-Pacific and Europe. These include Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, the UK, and Vietnam. We also had draft papers on NATO, Eastern Europe, Okinawa, and Taiwan.

    Project Publications—

    ____ ‘Worldviews on the United States, Alliances, and the Changing International Order:

    ____ ‘An Introduction', Contemporary Politics, 26:4, 371-383.