Presented by APF Canada in partnership with the Montreal Center for International Studies (CÉRIUM) at the University of Montreal, Dr. Cheng-Chwee Kuik's talk will outline why states hedge, using Southeast Asia’s responses to the Sino‑American rivalry to draw lessons for Canada.
Hedging, not balancing or bandwagoning, is the modal behaviour of the non-great powers under uncertainty. Despite its prevalence as a state alignment choice, hedging has remained an undertheorized subject in the study of international relations. Dr. Kuik will present his new book, Theorizing Hedging, in which he develops a two‑level theoretical framework explaining when, how, and why states choose to hedge instead of balancing or bandwagoning.
About the Speaker
Dr. Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), and an Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada Indo-Pacific Visiting Scholar. He is concurrently a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Foreign Policy Institute (Washington, DC). Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program.
His research focuses on non-great-power alignment behaviour, Southeast Asian international relations, and Asian security. He is the author of Theorizing Hedging: Explaining Shifts and Variations in Alignment Choices (Cambridge University Press, 2026), co-author (with David Lampton and Selina Ho) of Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (2020), and co-editor (with Alice Ba and Sueo Sudo) of Institutionalizing East Asia (2016).
A regular speaker at international conferences and closed-door policy roundtables, he serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Southeast Asia, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Journal of East Asian Studies, and several other international journals. He also served as Head of the Writing Team (2019–2020) for Malaysia’s inaugural Defence White Paper.
Dr. Kuik holds an M.Litt. from the University of St Andrews and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He has been listed among Stanford University’s list of the World’s Top 2% Scientists in the subfield of International Relations for 2023, 2024, and 2025.
