Former LISD Program Affiliation: 

Visiting Student Research Collaborator

Giridharan Ramasubramanian is a PhD student at the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy in the Australian National University. He completed his Master of Arts (International Relations) and Master of Diplomacy from the Australian National University. Prior to that, he did his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Melbourne University. He’s currently in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in Princeton University as a Visiting Research Student Collaborator under the supervision of Professor Wolfgang Danspeckgruber.

His project explores the evolution of institutional cooperation in the Asia-Pacific around the period of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and how that is shaped by deadlocks within highly formal global institutions and desire to improve upon existing bilateral and regional mechanisms. He will investigate this within a context of contestation and competition between the major actors in the region such as China, Japan and the United States as well as members of ASEAN. He is studying the re-negotiation of cooperation in different functional issue areas (Trade, Finance, Climate Change, Maritime Security) to better understand diverse processes of institutionalization and to illustrate the multi-layered nature of cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.