Experts

PROFILE NAME

Daisuke Kawai

Project Assistant Professor / Deputy Director of the Economic Security Research Program
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo

Daisuke Kawai is a Project Assistant Professor, and the Deputy Director of the Economic Security Program at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo. His areas of expertise include Japan’s foreign and security policy, Indo-Pacific security, arms control, and economic security, with a special interest in critical and emerging technologies (CETs).

His work has contributed to the development of Japan’s Economic Security Promotion Act (ESPA), commissioned by the Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation within the Cabinet Office of Japan. Currently, he leads the Critical and Emerging Technology cooperation within the Quad (Japan, the United States, Australia, and India).

He also holds the position of Senior Researcher at the Keio SFC Institute, Keio University, and a GRIPS Alliance Research Fellow at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), and serves as the Leader of the International Public Policy Unit at the Center for Strategic and Japanese Studies (CSJS), Kaetsu University, Japan, and the Asia Fellow at the Center for International Private Enterprise, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Previously, he has been a Research Fellow for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), focusing on security issues and regional order in the Indo-Pacific, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan. Additionally, he served as the secretariat of the Council of Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) Japan, and worked at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Kawai earned his Master’s degrees with distinction from the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, where he was a British Council Scholar. Also, as a Yenching Scholar, he holds LLM at Yenching Academy, Peking University, China. Prior to these achievements, he read diplomacy at the University of Oxford, the UK. He was a Japan-US Partnership Program fellow at the Research Institute for Peace and Security (RIPS), a Young Leader for the Asian Security Summit Shangri-La Dialogue at IISS, and a Munich Young Leader (MYL) for Munich Security Conference (MSC).

He garnered the JIIA's 60th Anniversary Essay Contest award with his essay titled "Building a Free and Rules-Based International Order". In 2024, he has been nominated as a David Rockefeller Fellow (DRF) of the Trilateral Commission, as well as the head of DRF Asia-Pacific Group.