Charmaine Misalucha-Willoughby is a nonresident scholar at Carnegie China, Carnegie’s East Asia-based research center on contemporary China, where she examines China-Philippine relations and maritime security issues in Southeast Asia. Willoughby is also an associate professor of international studies at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines, where she covers the Philippine-U.S. alliance, the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea, security cooperation, and international theory. She received her PhD from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University in 2009.
Willoughby was a 2017-2018 fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, a 2015 Advanced Security Cooperation (ASC15-2) fellow at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, a 2014 Japan Foundation fellow, and a 2013 US-ASEAN Fulbright fellow. Willoughby’s current research focuses on the narratives that emerge from information campaigns about the South China Sea. Concurrently, she is working on civil, maritime, and blue security and how these shape the Philippines’ foreign policy.
Willoughby is the senior editor of Asian Politics and Policy (Wiley) and co-editor of Bandung: Journal of the Global South (Brill). Her engagements outside academia include membership in the board of trustees of the Foundation for the National Interest, a newly established think tank in Manila, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Asia-Pacific’s Asia Strategic Foresight Group. She is a frequent resource speaker in various Track II fora and roundtables hosted by national government agencies.
Three scholars share their insights on the role China is playing in the South China Sea, and the wider implications of the ongoing disputes and their trajectories for Southeast Asia and beyond.
Neither Duterte’s pivot to China policy nor Marcos’s transparency initiative is changing China’s behavior.
Over the past three years, Southeast Asia has witnessed a series of important leadership transitions. How will these new leaders approach China and how will they differ from their predecessors?
For the Philippines, China’s actions in the contested maritime region are alarming, and the costs of not doing anything—or not doing enough—come with a high price.
What are the implications of the Iran-Saudi deal for China’s international role? Can China be expected to make efforts to de-escalate the war in Ukraine? Six scholars provide their takes.
Blinken’s Beijing visit will be seen through a security lens, but Washington should separate its alliance from Manila from its calculations around China.
Unless the new pledges under President Marcos translate into tangible development projects, the Marcos administration risks the same criticism as Duterte.
