Dr Pingtjin THUM is a Singaporean historian, and founder and Managing Director of New Naratif, a movement for democracy in Southeast Asia. As civil rights activists, he and his colleagues have been threatened, harassed, and condemned as traitors by Singapore’s government. Dr Thum earned his DPhil in History from Oxford in 2011 and is currently an Academic Visitor at Hertford College. He is a Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, his work centres on decolonisation in Southeast Asia, and its continuing impact on Southeast Asian governance and politics. His most recent published work is “Independence: The Further Stage of Colonialism in Singapore” in Barr and Rahim (eds.), The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State (Palgrave, 2019).