Giving practitioners academic scaffolding: RSIS leaders reflect as think-tank turns 30

SINGAPORE – In the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election, when the power of state-backed, algorithmically amplified disinformation campaigns started to become apparent, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) researchers saw this as an understudied area.

The school convened its first workshop on the topic the following year, bringing together global experts from fields including sociology, psychology, communications and military strategy.

Their conversations highlighted the need for a multi-pronged approach to combat disinformation as countries, including the US, grappled with ways to deal with the new threat.

When Singapore decided it needed a new law to tackle online falsehoods, RSIS researchers were called upon to contribute to the select committee process, which eventually led to the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act that came into effect in October 2019.

As RSIS commemorates its 30th anniversary in 2026, three leaders from the school shared with The Straits Times its role in supporting policymaking over the years and providing practitioners with intellectual grounding in geopolitics.

Benjamin Ang, head of RSIS’ Centre of Excellence for National Security, said that while individuals were focused on different aspects of disinformation at the time, RSIS researchers believed that the issue was significant and required them to piece the full picture together.

“That’s why we constantly run workshops where we bring together experts from around the world, from different angles – many of whom have never heard of one another before on these issues like disinformation, foreign interference and cybersecurity,” Ang said.

“We get the most complete picture that we can give, and we invite policymakers to this.”

RSIS began as the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in 1996, and has since grown into a think-tank and graduate school that studies a broad range of strategic and security issues.

Kumar Ramakrishna, who took over as RSIS dean in 2023, said the institution helps the authorities anticipate developments “to prevent them from being blindsided”.

“The Government has their own agencies and internal analytical capabilities, but RSIS’ role is to support that effort,” he said, adding that its research is intended for practitioners in government rather than academics.

Intellectual scaffolding to counter terrorism

One of RSIS’ contributions to Singapore’s security in its early years was supporting the Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG) in its efforts to rehabilitate detained Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) operatives in the early 2000s.

The Government had sought assistance from Muslim religious leaders to engage the detainees, said Kumar, who was previously the head of RSIS’ International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research.

Although the religious leaders understood, through their own religious training, how extremist ideology deviated from Islam, Kumar said they also needed to learn how the ideology came about.

This includes the origins of JI, which he said has been mistakenly attributed to being a creation of Al-Qaeda.

Instead, its origins can be traced to Darul Islam, a group from Indonesia formed in 1942. In the 1980s, its members had travelled to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, and became influenced by global jihadist figures and their vision of a global caliphate.

JI was established in 1993 with the aim of creating a pan-South-east Asian caliphate.

To understand the geopolitics behind extremist movements, some of the religious scholars involved in the RRG attended postgraduate training at RSIS.

Kumar said that while knowledge of the religious doctrine was important, it was insufficient on its own in addressing the root causes of extremism during the rehabilitation process.

The RSIS training had given the Muslim scholars “a very good holistic understanding of the big picture of extremist Islam at that time”, he said.

With the evolution of extremism over the years through self-radicalisation and the influence of far-right ideas, Kumar said the institution continues to provide the RRG with a platform to study this threat.

Today, there are RSIS academics who are part of the RRG and are involved in rehabilitating detainees alongside case officers and psychologists.

Several Ministry of Home Affairs officers also receive training from RSIS, gaining the “intellectual scaffolding” and wider academic grounding, Kumar said.

“Not just in counter-terrorism but also in geopolitics, which I think is very important for them to develop a broader and holistic view of international trends which impact the evolution of transnational terrorism,” he added.

From policy review to horizon scanning

Ang said one of RSIS’ significant roles is reviewing policies and policy decisions, and creating awareness of their impacts among the public and international partners.

He cited an analysis done in 2024 after the authorities blocked 10 fake websites linked to foreign actors.

The sites mimicked typical news portals and were said to be potential avenues for conducting disinformation campaigns against Singapore.

“We had done a deep dive into these websites – where they came from, what they were doing – and were able to compare them with other global disinformation tactics and explain it in a way that everybody could understand,” Ang noted.

Such analysis of policy also involves having a broader conception of security in Singapore, which includes knowledge of potential areas of vulnerability that can be exploited.

Leong Chan-Hoong, the head of RSIS’ Social Cohesion Research Programme, has studied social integration within housing estates using 10 years of data from Singapore’s Ethnic Integration Policy.

Areas such as Bishan and Toa Payoh were found to have a larger proportion of Chinese, while Malay home buyers have pivoted to places like Marsiling and Pasir Ris, with Indians observed to be more dispersed across estates.

One finding was that neighbourhoods with a higher concentration of permanent residents and ethnic minorities reported lower social trust.

His research also found that having a shared space like a community club can meaningfully bring diverse communities together, although the effect diminished with distance and fell off beyond about 120m.

One of the proposals put forward by Leong in 2018 for better social mixing was to relocate “good schools away from the popular places”, which some people thought was a controversial idea back then.

However, Anglo-Chinese School (Primary) announced in 2023 that it would move from Barker Road to Tengah in 2030 as part of a major effort to provide greater accessibility for as many pupils as possible.

Leong said he would not know whether his research had contributed to that decision.

“But it doesn’t matter. The fact is that these are the things that we do to understand social cohesion and how we can foster the mindshare of living together,” he said.

Looking ahead to emerging threats

One area that RSIS is studying is the intersection between artificial intelligence and other emerging areas such as space and quantum technology, said Ang.

One example is the use of AI to process data from satellite imagery. RSIS is examining various aspects, including issues of governance and what other countries are doing on this front.

“We propose options based on what we see around the world, and our analysis is based on how we think it applies to Singapore,” said Ang.

During a lecture in September commemorating RSIS’ 30th anniversary, Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing said that interpreting ongoing change was a necessary but insufficient competency for the organisation. It needed to go beyond interpreting current events and “ponder the improbable” – the foundational motto of RSIS.

It is this horizon-scanning role that Kumar describes as being “a canary in a coal mine”.

One growing concern in the extremism space is the trend of offenders carrying out violence without an ideological reason.

Recent cases in the region include a November 2025 school bombing in Indonesia orchestrated by a teenager who had far-right inscriptions on his toy gun, but showed little understanding of the ideology.

Understanding this new trend may require a different approach in dealing with radicalised individuals, noted Kumar.

“Maybe we should just look at how to build youth resilience against any kind of extremist ideas, including nihilistic ideas – the idea that violence is good,” he said.