In Memory of Des Ball by Professor Amitav Acharya

In Memory of Des Ball
Amitav Acharya

My first sight of Desmond Ball was somewhere in the maze-like corridors of the Coombs building at ANU. It was the Fall of 1983, and I was lost as a visiting student at the Coral Bell School’s Strategic and Defense Studies Center (SDSC) from Murdoch University in Perth, where I had just started my doctorate a few months earlier. The head of the SDSC was Tom Millar. Des, as I had known him even before our first meeting, was the closest thing to a legend for many people like me aspiring to a career in strategic studies (as the field was mostly known then). Frankly, whether he knew it or not, we all wanted to be like Desmond Ball.

There were good reasons for this. By 1983 Des had already become one the most prolific and influential scholars on strategic studies in the world, and certainly at the top of the field in Asia-Pacific. But what gave him near cult status among strategic studies scholars and peace researchers and activists (I knew a few of them in Freemantle, W.A., where I lived) was his work exposing US military bases in Australia, a favourite target of the Australian peace activists. It is from them that I first came to know of him.

Indeed, in 1983 I discussed my dissertation topic with him, which focused on the US military strategy in the Gulf, especially the origins of what is now the US Central Command. We also discussed the possibility of me moving to Canberra to work with him. That did not happen but our association grew as both of us shifted the focus on our work from classical military-strategic studies to broader issues of regional security. While I could not take up a job offer from SDSC, our shared interests and collaboration only grew closer over the next decades.

The 1990s saw a major shift in strategic studies, from traditional concerns focusing on nuclear weapons, strategy and arms control to regional security issues. Des was a leader in contributing to this shift. My own work also moved from issues of hard military strategy to regional security and regionalism. Des and I shared interest in several areas, arms proliferation, Asia-Pacific regional order, multilateral security and preventive diplomacy (We co-edited a book on the latter, published as a Canberra Paper). I made liberal use of his personal home archives, with its piles of news clippings, conference papers, and documents, one of the reasons where I stayed with him a few times when I visited Canberra. When I became  the Deputy Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (the precursor to the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies) in Singapore, Des at my behest became an adviser to the Institute. But predictably, he did not last long thanks to his streak of independent thinking and passion for exposing secretive strategic matters. We often attended many conferences together, including the Asia-Pacific Roundtable in Malaysia, and conferences throughout the region. It is when I moved to the US in 2009 that our contacts became less frequent.

Des’ work combined academic scholarship, policy analysis and advocacy of peace and security. He was an academic detective par excellence, always on the lookout for new, hard-to-get information, often through extensive archival digging and daring fieldwork (like the Thai-Burma border). This inspired me to no end. Over the years, I had went along with him to places which he would describe to me as “sigint” installations.

I last met Des at his hospital bed in the last days of his life when I came to participate in SDSC’s 50th anniversary. Through our four decades of association, Des had become a hero, mentor, collaborator, friend and fellow traveler, to me. I developed and still have a sense of privilege and pride of having known him. Asia-Pacific strategic and security studies would never be the same without Demond Ball being around. It is thus with a deep sense of nostalgia, gratitude and pride that I accept the honor of being the 2026 Demond Ball Visiting Chair in Strategic Studies.

About Professor Amitav Acharya
Professor Amitav Acharya is Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University, Washington D.C., where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service. He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected President of the International Studies Association, the largest and most influential global network in international studies. His research has fundamentally reshaped how the discipline of international relations understands power, order, and the agency of the Global South, through his work on norm localisation, Asian regionalism, and what he calls Global International Relations, a framework that challenges the long dominance of Western-centric theory. His book Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia was the principal basis for the establishment of the ASEAN Political Security Community. He has received three ISA Distinguished Scholar Awards and, in 2020, American University's highest honour, the Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award.