Philippe Peycam

Philippe Peycam is the director of the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, The Netherland. He is a trained historian whose first book on the origins of a Vietnamese public culture of contestation during the colonial occupation, The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-30, was published by Columbia University Press (May, 2012). For 10 years, Dr. Peycam worked as founding director of the Center for Khmer Studies, an academic and capacity building institution in Cambodia. He is currently working on an essay which sets out to use this experience at CKS to frame a reproducible policy model aimed at civil society empowerment through cultural and intellectual institutional infrastructures in post-war societies.

Dr. Peycam’s double trajectory, academic and institution building, stems from an early interest in phenomena such as colonialism and modes of resistance to it; the creative role of the city as a privileged environment for new forms of social and cultural interactions, and ultimately, consciousness; the importance of cultural forms and representations, from material and immaterial heritages to institutional knowledge production, and the challenge of building cross-cultural, transnational bridges out of these contexts. He sees these intellectual interests as having implications for concrete development policies in today’s postcolonial societies. From 2010-2011, he was a United States Institute of Peace’s Jenning Randolph Fellow. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.