Christopher is a researcher at the academic-policy interface, specialising in the field of international political economy, with a focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. He currently serves as an Associate Director of Research at the Khazanah Research Institute (KRI), looking at gender, care, and social reproduction, as well as broader issues of poverty, inequality, and exclusion.
In recognition of his academic and professional achievements, Christopher was appointed as an an Honorary Research Fellow with the University of Warwick in Politics and International Studies, and an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development, Sunway University. Prior to joining KRI, he served as the Economist/Programme Manager for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Country Office of Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam, responsible for the inclusive growth portfolio of the country programme.
Christopher's first monograph, a conversion of this thesis, is titled "Raced-Gendered Capitalism in Malaysia: When Empires Meet the Everyday". His thesis received an honourable mention for the Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize in 2026. In 2023, he was selected as the winner of the Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial (CPD) Early Career Researcher Paper Prize organised by the CPD British International Studies Association Working Group. Christopher's regional, eight-nation research project, “Inequality and Exclusion in Southeast Asia: Old Fractures, New Frontiers”, was published in 2021. He was also the lead author of the report “Time to Care: Gender Inequality, Unpaid Care Work and Time Use Survey”, the first contemporary research in Malaysia to use a time-use survey. He plays an active role in peer-reviewing journal articles, policy papers and reports, and contributes to public discourse through media engagements, speaking events and guest lectures.
Christopher completed his PhD at the University of Warwick, where he was a recipient of the Chancellor’s International Scholarship. His research interests include the political economy of Malaysia/Southeast Asia, feminist international political economy, social reproduction theories, racial capitalism, and dependency theory. Christopher also holds an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he was awarded the Atkinson Prize; an MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies; and a BSc in Economics from the University of Malaya.
I don’t believe there is such thing as ‘lasting’ change. Change requires a perpetual process of commitment, resistance and questioning of the status quo by people who believe in a just and equal society for all. Challenging inequality is something that we have to keep doing, not a utopic state to attain. There’s a quote from Tony Benn that I really like: ‘There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.Christopher Choong Weng Wai