Rate My Professor Carlyle Thayer

Carlyle A. Thayer is Emeritus Professor of Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. He earned a BA from Brown University in 1967, an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from Yale University in 1971, and a PhD in International Relations from the Australian National University in 1977. Prior to academia, he served in Vietnam with International Voluntary Services from 1967 to 1968 and taught as a volunteer in Botswana from 1968 to 1969. Thayer began his academic career as a lecturer at Bendigo Institute of Technology in 1976 before joining UNSW in 1979. There, he taught in the Faculty of Military Studies at the Royal Military College-Duntroon until 1985 and then at University College, Australian Defence Force Academy from 1986 to 2010. He served as Head of the School of Politics from 1995 to 1997, was promoted to full Professor in 1998, and granted Emeritus Professor status in 2010. Since 2002, he has directed Thayer Consultancy, offering political analysis on regional security issues.

Thayer's research focuses on Vietnamese politics, including leadership and generational change in the Vietnam Communist Party, decision-making processes, elections, legal reform, the National Assembly's role, political dissent, civil society emergence, human rights, religious freedom, ethnic minorities, and political legitimacy. He examines the Vietnam People's Army's leadership, defence diplomacy, arms procurement, force modernization, and socio-economic roles. Additional interests encompass Vietnam's foreign policy toward China, the United States, and ASEAN; multilateral Asia-Pacific security institutions like ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum; China's defence cooperation with Southeast Asia; and climate change's security impacts. With over 500 publications, key works include "Vietnam and the challenge of political civil society" (2009), "ASEAN's Code of Conduct in the South China Sea: A Litmus Test for Community-Building?" (2012), "Political Legitimacy of Vietnam's One Party-State: Challenges and Responses" (2009), and the book "War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet-Nam, 1954–60" (2021). Thayer has supervised more than a dozen PhD theses at UNSW, innovated military education through crisis simulations and distance learning, and provides expert media commentary in over 200 interviews annually. In 2020, he was recognized by Marquis Who's Who as a Top Educator for leadership in Southeast Asian studies and professional military education.