Our Team
Bec Strating, Steering Committee Chair WIIS-Australia
Bec Strating is the Director of La Trobe Asia and an Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her research primarily focuses on maritime disputes in Asia and Australian foreign and defence policy. She has written three monographs, most recently “Defending the Maritime Rules-Based Order” (2020). In 2019 she was awarded an Asian Studies Visiting Fellowship to research at the East West Center in Washington DC for three months. She has also been a visiting affiliate fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, an affiliated researcher at Georgetown University, and a non-visiting fellow at the Perth US Asia Centre. She has co-edited two special journal issues and written multiple journal articles and book chapters, including in Pacific Review, Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and the Australian Handbook of International Law. In 2019, her second monograph, “The Post-Colonial Security Dilemma”, was published with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Boyer Prize by the Australian Institute of International Affairs for best article published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2017 for her paper ‘Timor-Leste’s Foreign Policy Approach to the Timor Sea: Pipeline or Pipedream?’ Bec is on the editorial boards of the Australian Journal of International Affairs and the Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies and was a commissioning editor for Australian Outlook (2019-2020). She contributes commentary pieces for organisations such as Lowy Institute, The Conversation, and Australian Outlook, and provides comment to media including the ABC, the Australian, and Sydney Morning Herald. She has testified in Australian federal parliament as an expert witness. She tweets @becstrating.