KWON Marie

Biography

I am a doctoral researcher in International Relations at the Centre for the Study of War and Violence and at the Chair in Geopolitics of Risk at ENS-PSL, working under the supervision of Julien Pomarède and J. Peter Burgess. My research, supported by a FRESH scholarship from the F.R.S.-FNRS, sits at the intersection of political geography and critical security studies, with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific region.

I am currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and an Associate at the Asia Center of Harvard University. In 2025, I was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University.

My doctoral dissertation examines the Indo-Pacific as both a strategic and an epistemic formation. It asks how regional space is imagined, institutionalised and contested with particular attention to Indonesian and South Korean elite perspectives. More broadly, I am interested in how the historical legacies of power politics, security practices, material politics and competing knowledge systems shape regional practices in Asia. My wider research engages questions of geopolitics, knowledge production and regional ordering, as well as the place of representations of infrastructure and nature in contemporary international politics.

My current publication projects include work on Materiality and Foreign Policy Analysis and on the development of a broader research agenda on Blue Politics. Alongside my doctoral work, I contribute to academic and policy-oriented projects on foreign policy, ASEAN regionalism and European approaches to the Indo-Pacific.

I hold degrees in Asian Studies from SOAS University of London (BA), International Security from Sciences Po Paris (MA) and Politics from New York University (MA). Prior to my PhD, I gained research and policy experience in South Korea, France and Belgium, including at the Jeju Peace Institute, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the International Crisis Group.