Making Identity Count in Asia: Identity Relations in Singapore and its Neighborhood

This is a three-year grant commencing in September 2017 awarded by the newly-created Singapore Social Science Research Council. It involves investigating the national identities of all ASEAN countries, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2010 and 2015. The national identities of these countries will be recovered using discourse analysis of mass and elite texts in each country Singapore will also be a testbed for multiple methodological approaches beyond discourse analysis, including a national survey, focus groups, ethnographies, and an analysis of social media. Monographs and research articles are planned on the identity relations among these states, between these states and great powers, the national identity projects of these states, as well as on multiple methodological approaches to studying national identity. The project involves NUS faculty from Political Science, Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, History, as well as from Yale-NUS, SMU, and NTU. The project is related to the Making Identity Count project which aims at creating a large-n interpretivist national identity database for all great powers from 1810-2010. The first publication from that project is Making Identity Count (Oxford 2016).

For links to our identity reports and the focus group discussions and identity survey for Singapore, please visit:

Below is a list of selected publications that followed from the project:


PI & Co-PI(s):
Chong Ja Ian & Reuben Wong

Funding Agency: Ministry of Education Social Science and Humanities Research Thematic Grant (MOE2016-SSRTG-020)
Project Duration: 1 September 2017 – 28 February 2021