Mark R. Thompson

He also works on politics in various Southeast Asia countries in comparative perspective. Together with William C Case he was awarded a major General Research Fund Hong Kong government grant ‘Democracy and its Discontents in Southeast Asia’ in July 2013.

Together with Stephan Ortmann, he is also completing a project funded through a Strategic Research Grant (SRG) of the City University of Hong Kong about China's interest in the “Singapore Model." He has also written on the ‘Asian values’/’Asian democracy’ debate and is currently finishing a book project on ‘authoritarian modernism’ in East Asia.

Thompson started his career as specialist on the Philippines where he spent three years in the second half of the 1980s doing field research on the opposition to Marcos which he published as The Anti-Marcos Struggle (1995). He has continued to write frequently on Philippine politics and is currently working on a book project about the Philippine presidency with Julio C Teehankee, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, De la Salle University with whom he recently received a major Hong Kong government GRF grant to study the rise of illiberal rule in the Philippines. Thompson delivered a keynote speech at the Philippine Political Science Association (PPSA) Annual Conference, 10–11 April 2014 later published as “Southeast Asia’s Subversive Voters: A Philippine Perspective,” published in Philippine Studies (2016).

He completed a major German Research Foundation (DFG) project about dynastic female leaders in Asia in which he co-edited a volume published in German (2004) and in English (2013) and has continued to write about issues related to dynastic and female leadership (with the latter research area also involving an article written shortly after Angela Merkel became Chancellor of Germany).

He taught in various universities in Germany for nearly two decades, including as a lecturer at the University of Münster (1990-1991), as an academic assistant the Federal Army University (Bundeswehr Universität), 1992) in Munich and at the Dresden University of Technology (Technische Universität Dresden), 1993-1995), as acting chair professor and director of the Southeast Asia programme at the University of Passau (2003-2004) and as professor of politics at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg beginning in 1997 and again after 2004. He taught in the politics department at the University of Glasgow in Scotland from 1995 to 1997. He is currently teaching at City University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, China. He has been a visitor at various universities around the world including Thammasat and Chulalongkorn universities in Thailand, De la Salle and Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, The University of California, Berkeley, The University for Peace, Costa Rica and Keio University, Japan (the latter two as invited visiting professor). He was Lee Kong Chian distinguished visiting fellow for Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore in autumn 2008 and, in spring 2009, at Stanford University.

In the 1990s he published a series of articles on Eastern Europe, former East Germany in particular, as part of his comparative interest in ‘democratic revolutions’, with a book with this title published by Routledge in 2004.

Thompson grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He completed his B.A. in religious studies from Brown University in 1982 where he also received a Baker scholarship to do postgraduate work at Cambridge University (MA in Social and Political Sciences, 1984). He received an M.A. and Ph.D. (1991 with honors) in political science at Yale University where he was supervised by Juan J. Linz and James C. Scott. Earlier he had received a Dorot foundation fellowship to attend a summer programme at Hebrew University (1980) and a Rotary Foundation scholarship to enroll in the political science MA programme at the University of the Philippines, Diliman (1984–85). In 1983 he studied German at the Goethe Institut, Boppard and in 1988 he studied Tagalog (Filipino) with a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Mark R. Thompson (born June 8, 1960) is an expert on Southeast Asian politics, with particular interest in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. He also works on broader themes of comparative politics, particularly authoritarianism and democratization. He is professor of politics at the City University of Hong Kong, where he is head of the Department of Asian and International Studies (AIS) and also director of the Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC). Earlier he taught in the United Kingdom (Glasgow), Germany (Muenster, Dresden, Passau and Erlangen-Nuremberg), and Japan (Keio University). In 2013-2014 he was president of the Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA). He has been a regularly commentator on Southeast Asian politics in the international media.