The Pok Rafeah Chair: Three Decades of Investing in Global Ideas

In Malaysia, one university chair has, for nearly three decades, brought leading thinkers on globalization and international affairs to Malaysian soil. It is funded by Yayasan Pok Rafeah, a charitable trust named after the mother of the late Malaysian finance minister Tun Dr Daim Zainuddin, whose family has built a tradition of philanthropy spanning education, health, the arts, and international scholarship.

An endowment built to last

Founded in 1996, the Pok Rafeah Chair in International Studies is housed at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Unlike a one-time grant or a single sponsored event, an endowed chair is designed to function in perpetuity: the funding underwrites the position year after year, regardless of who occupies it at any given moment.

The Chair's mandate is focused on globalization studies, giving IKMAS both a mechanism to expand its research into new areas and a way to build lasting connections with scholars of international standing.

A rotating roster of global scholars

What makes the Chair notable is the calibre and diversity of the academics who have held it. The inaugural chair, from 1997 to 1999, went to Professor James H. Mittelman, a professor of international relations at American University in Washington, D.C. He was followed by Professor Yoshihara Kunio, a development economist from Kyoto University's Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, whose tenure bridged 2001 and 2002.

In 2006 and 2007 the Chair was held by Professor Joan M. Nelson, whose research focused on the politics of economic reform and democratization in developing countries. She was succeeded by Professor Anthony Milner, former Dean of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, who held the position from 2010 to 2011. Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse of the University of California, Santa Barbara served from 2014 to 2015, followed by Emeritus Professor Hans-Dieter Evers, a development-planning scholar associated with the University of Bielefeld and the University of Bonn's Center for Development Research. More recently, Professor Paul Evans of the University of British Columbia served for the 2022 academic year.

Taken together, the list spans the United States, Japan, Australia, Germany, and Canada, and disciplines from international relations and economic development to sociology and Asian history. (Appointment years are as listed in institutional material and are worth confirming against IKMAS records for precise dates.)

Ideas that shaped a research agenda

The Chair's impact lies less in the résumés of its holders than in the work they produced while at IKMAS. Professor Mittelman's tenure was later remembered by IKMAS colleagues as more than a visiting appointment: he arrived when the institute was only two years old, and his leadership was credited with helping inspire the work that gave IKMAS its “identifying intellectual signature.”

Practically-informed yet also critical and independent scholarship on matters of large public and national interest.

Later chairholders left an equally tangible mark through IKMAS's public lecture series, which paired each appointment with original research delivered directly to Malaysian audiences. Professor Nederveen Pieterse's 2014 inaugural lecture, “What Happened to the Miracle Eight? Looking East in the Twenty-First Century,” examined the trajectories of East Asia's fast-growing economies and was later published as a peer-reviewed article in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

Professor Evers's work was encapsulated in consecutive public lectures — “Nusantara: Malaysia and the Geopolitics of the South China Sea” (2016) and “Connecting Oceans: Malaysia as a Maritime Nation” (2017) — both later published as monographs by Penerbit UKM. The lectures argued that Malaysia's position between the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Pacific makes it a maritime civilization whose port cities and inter-regional connectivity are central to ASEAN integration. IKMAS subsequently built a research programme, “Connecting Oceans,” on that groundwork. More recently, Professor Evans's 2022 seminar, “Indo-Pacific: What's in a Name?”, interrogated how that geopolitical term has been defined and redefined by strategists and policymakers.

A legacy measured in scholarship

Nearly thirty years after its founding, the Pok Rafeah Chair stands as an enduring philanthropic gift — one that has brought internationally distinguished thinkers to engage, again and again, with Malaysia's place in a globalizing world.