ASEAN–Korea Young Scholar Research Grant 2026: Round-Trip Airfare Plus a US$1,400 Monthly Fieldwork Stipend for Up to Three Months of Southeast Asia Research, Closing 5 September 2026

ASEAN–Korea Young Scholar Research Grant 2026: Round-Trip Airfare Plus a US$1,400 Monthly Fieldwork Stipend for Up to Three Months of Southeast Asia Research, Closing 5 September 2026

Most postgraduate students working on Southeast Asia hit the same wall at the same moment: the proposal is written, the supervisor is satisfied, and the research design depends on three months in a province the student has never been able to afford to visit. The 2026 ASEAN–Korea Young Scholar Research Grant exists precisely for that gap. It does not fund tuition, laboratory equipment, or a salary. It funds a plane ticket, three months of living costs at the field site, and a small honorarium for the local scholar who will keep you from making avoidable mistakes once you arrive.

The grant is administered by the Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies (KASEAS) as part of the ASEAN–Korea Platform for Great Minds (AKPGM), a project running from July 2025 to July 2028 and financed by the Government of the Republic of Korea through the ASEAN–Korea Cooperation Fund (AKCF). AKPGM operates out of the Asiatic Research Center at Korea University in Seoul.

Applications for the 2026 round close on 5 September 2026, and the fieldwork window runs from late November 2026 through April 2027. That is a short runway, and it shapes almost every piece of advice in this guide.

Key Details at a Glance

What the Grant Actually Pays For

The award package has four components, and it helps to be precise about each.

Round-trip international airfare covers travel to and from the approved fieldwork site. The call describes this as airfare “for approved fieldwork,” which means the destination in your funded proposal is the destination the ticket serves. If your plans change materially after selection, that is a conversation to have with AKPGM rather than something to handle quietly.

A monthly fieldwork stipend of US$1,400 for up to three months. The phrasing matters twice over. “Up to three months” means a shorter field stay is fundable — a six-week project is not disqualified — but the ceiling on the stipend line is US$4,200. And “fieldwork stipend” means the money is intended to sustain you at the site: accommodation, local transport, food, and the small running costs of doing research. It is not framed as a salary or as a research budget for equipment.

A US$200 honorarium for a local research advisor. This is a modest sum, but its presence in the package is a signal about the kind of research the funder wants. The programme assumes you will be attached to somebody on the ground — a scholar at a host institution who can vouch for you, orient you, and open doors. Building that relationship is not an optional courtesy here; it is baked into the application requirements.

Participation in the Young Scholar Research Workshop, held online. This is where the “platform” part of AKPGM shows itself. The grant is not just a transfer of money to individuals; it is an attempt to build a cohort of early-career Southeast Asianists who know each other across national boundaries.

Taken together, a full three-month award is worth roughly US$4,400 in direct payments plus the cost of an international ticket. For a master’s or doctoral student in the region, that is often the difference between a desk-based dissertation and one grounded in primary material.

Who Is Eligible

The call sets three hard requirements. Applicants must:

• Be nationals of an ASEAN Member State or of the Republic of Korea.
• Be currently enrolled in a master’s or doctoral programme at a recognised institution in ASEAN or the Republic of Korea.
• Conduct research relevant to Southeast Asian Studies, ASEAN Studies, or ASEAN–Korea Studies — which the call explains as covering Southeast Asian societies, regional issues, or ASEAN–Korea relations.

Note what the citizenship and enrolment rules do together: you must hold the nationality of a participating country and be enrolled at an institution somewhere in ASEAN or Korea. A Filipino doctoral candidate enrolled in Manila qualifies. A Vietnamese master’s student enrolled in Seoul qualifies. A German student enrolled in Singapore does not, because the nationality condition is not met.

The call does not publish a fixed number of awards. Instead it states that, to promote balanced regional representation, the selection committee “generally aims to award up to one grant per ASEAN Member State and the Republic of Korea, subject to the quality of applications received.” In practice this means roughly a dozen awards, and — more importantly for you — that you are competing hardest against other applicants from your own country rather than against the entire regional pool. A strong application from a country that submits few applications has real structural advantage.

The Two Selection Priorities That Decide Most Applications

Beyond eligibility, the call publishes two explicit selection priorities, and they are unusual enough that misreading either will quietly cost you.

Priority goes to applicants enrolled at institutions in their home countries. This is stated plainly under “institutional affiliation.” The programme is trying to strengthen Southeast Asian Studies inside Southeast Asia, not only to subsidise regional students already sitting in well-resourced universities abroad. If you are enrolled at home, say so clearly and early in your materials. If you are enrolled outside your home country, you are not excluded — but you should give the committee some other reason to see your project as strengthening scholarly capacity in the region.

Priority goes to research that reaches beyond your own national context. This is the priority most likely to trip up an otherwise excellent proposal. The call states that applications are open to research on any country or region in Southeast Asia, but that “priority will be given to proposals that support Southeast Asian Studies as the study of Southeast Asia beyond the applicant’s own national context. Accordingly, lower priority may be given to proposals focusing exclusively on the applicant’s home country or the country in which they are currently enrolled.”

Read that carefully if your dissertation is a single-country study of your own country. You are still eligible to apply, but you are applying into a stated disadvantage. There are honest ways to respond. A comparative component — a second field site in a neighbouring country, a paired case, a regional framing that treats your home case as one instance of something broader — changes the character of the proposal without abandoning the work you have already done. Fieldwork in a country other than your own is the clearest fit of all.

There is also a scope exclusion worth flagging. Proposals that are primarily technical, laboratory-based, or focused exclusively on science, technology, engineering and mathematics are not eligible. The call allows exceptions only for projects with strong interdisciplinary engagement with the social sciences or humanities that make a clear contribution to understanding Southeast Asia and ASEAN–Korea relations. A study of agricultural technology adoption among smallholders, framed around rural political economy, plausibly qualifies. A study of crop yields under a new irrigation regime does not.

What You Have to Submit

The application asks for five documents, uploaded through the online form:

1. Research proposal
2. Host institution introduction for the fieldwork site
3. Curriculum vitae
4. Certificate of enrolment from your current or most recent academic institution
5. Academic transcript, including records up to the most recent semester

Three of these are administrative and can be requested from your registrar this week — do that first, because certificates of enrolment and up-to-date transcripts routinely take longer to issue than students expect, and a September deadline leaves no slack.

The host institution introduction is the item that requires other people’s cooperation, so it should be your second priority. The call names it as a requirement in its own right, separate from the proposal, which tells you the committee wants concrete evidence that a real institution at the field site knows you are coming. If you do not yet have that relationship, the fastest honest route is usually through your supervisor’s network: ask them to make an introduction to a counterpart at a university, research centre, or NGO at your intended site, and follow up with a short, specific email describing what you want to study, when you would arrive, and what you are asking of the host.

How the Committee Reads Applications

The call lists four evaluation criteria:

• Academic quality, originality and significance of the research
• Relevance to Southeast Asian Studies, ASEAN Studies, or ASEAN–Korea Studies
• Quality and feasibility of the proposed fieldwork
• The applicant’s research capacity and preparedness

Two of those four are about execution rather than ideas, which is the clearest signal in the whole call about how to write. This is a fieldwork grant on a compressed timetable, evaluated by people who have done fieldwork in the region and know what goes wrong. A proposal that is intellectually ambitious but vague about method, access, language, permissions, and sequencing reads as risky.

Concretely, a proposal that scores well on feasibility answers questions like these without being asked: Where exactly will you be, and for how long at each site? Who are you talking to, how will you reach them, and roughly how many? What language will the research be conducted in, and what is your competence in it — or who is interpreting? Do you need research permits or ethics clearance, and what is the status of each? What is your host institution’s role? What happens to the project if one access route closes?

“Research capacity and preparedness” is where your CV and transcript do real work. Prior fieldwork, relevant language training, a completed methods sequence, earlier work at or near the site, and existing contacts are all evidence. If you have none of it, the host institution introduction and a rigorously realistic plan carry more of the load.

The Timeline and What It Demands of You

The gap between a late-October result and a late-November departure is about four weeks. That is enough time to book travel and confirm arrangements; it is not enough time to start a permit application from scratch, secure ethics approval at a slow institution, or negotiate access with a ministry. If any of those steps apply to your project, begin them now, before you know whether you have been funded. Applicants who wait for the result to start their paperwork are the ones who end up asking for a delayed start.

The fieldwork window also spans a particular slice of the calendar in Southeast Asia. Depending on your site, late November to April may cover monsoon conditions, harvest cycles, major religious and national holidays, or an election period. Show in the proposal that you have thought about what is actually happening at your site during those months and why that timing serves — or at minimum does not undermine — your research design. Committees notice when an applicant plans around the region’s real rhythms.

Building a Strong Application in the Time You Have

With roughly a month from publication to deadline, sequence the work rather than writing the proposal first.

Week one: request the certificate of enrolment and transcript from your registrar, and send the first email to a prospective host institution. Both depend on other people.

Week two: draft the research proposal around the four evaluation criteria rather than around your dissertation chapters. Your dissertation prospectus is not the same document — it is usually too long, too heavy on literature, and too light on logistics. Rewrite it so that significance, regional relevance, and fieldwork feasibility each get real space.

Week three: deal with the regional-scope priority honestly. If your project is confined to your own country, decide whether you can add a genuine comparative or regional dimension, or whether you would rather submit as-is and accept the stated disadvantage. Do not simply relabel a national study as regional in the title; a committee of Southeast Asianists will see through it in a paragraph.

Week four: tighten the CV so the reviewer can find the relevant items — languages, prior fieldwork, methods training, regional experience — without hunting. Confirm the host institution letter has actually arrived. Submit a few days early; the application runs through an online form, and last-day uploads are where files go missing.

Common Mistakes That Weaken Applications

• Submitting the dissertation prospectus unchanged. It answers a different question than the one being asked.
• Treating the host institution introduction as an afterthought. It is a listed requirement and a direct piece of feasibility evidence.
• Writing a single-country study of your own country without acknowledging the stated priority. Address it directly rather than hoping it goes unnoticed.
• Submitting a project that is really a STEM project with a social-science sentence attached. The exception in the call requires genuine interdisciplinary engagement, not framing.
• Leaving language and access unexplained. If the committee cannot tell how you will communicate with the people in your research design, feasibility scores suffer.
• Budgeting as though the stipend were a research budget. The package is airfare, living costs, and an advisor honorarium. If your method requires paid enumerators, transcription, or archival fees, say where that money comes from.
• Starting permits after the results arrive. The four-week gap will not absorb it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a recurring programme? AKPGM runs from July 2025 to July 2028, and the site lists a 2025 ASEAN–Korea Young Scholar Research Grant alongside the 2026 call, so the grant appears to be an annual cycle within that project period. Future rounds are not formally guaranteed on the call page.

Can I apply if I am in the final months of my programme? The requirement is current enrolment in a master’s or doctoral programme, and the transcript requirement refers to records “up to the most recent semester.” The document list also allows a certificate of enrolment from your “current or most recent” institution. If your status is genuinely borderline, email [email protected] before the deadline rather than guessing.

Can the fieldwork be shorter than three months? Yes. The stipend is described as covering up to three months, which sets a maximum rather than a minimum.

Does the grant cover a research assistant or dependants? Nothing in the published package covers either. The four listed benefits are airfare, the monthly stipend, the US$200 advisor honorarium, and the online workshop.

Do I have to travel to Korea? No. The Young Scholar Research Workshop is held online, and the funded travel is to the fieldwork site.

Can I do fieldwork in Korea? The grant supports fieldwork that advances understanding of Southeast Asia, ASEAN–Korea relations, and regional dynamics, and the research-scope note says applications are open to research on any country or region in Southeast Asia. A project centred on Korea alone is not the intended shape; a project on ASEAN–Korea relations with a clear Southeast Asian component is much closer to the mark. If this describes your project, ask the organisers directly.

How many people are funded? No fixed number is published. The stated aim is generally up to one grant per ASEAN Member State and the Republic of Korea, subject to the quality of applications.

Official Links and Contacts

• Call for applications (official): https://www.akpgm.org/post/call-for-applications-2026-young-scholar-research-grant-ysrg
• Application form: https://forms.gle/ByMAaDezmX2YdS6A8
• AKPGM programme site: https://www.akpgm.org
• ASEAN–Korea Cooperation Fund: http://www.aseanrokfund.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Postal address: Room 306, Asiatic Research Center, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Verify all dates and requirements against the official call page before submitting. Where this guide interprets the published criteria — particularly the advice on comparative framing and on sequencing permits — that is practical judgement, not an official instruction, and the organisers’ own wording governs.

Is This Grant a Fit for You?

The clearest fit is a master’s or doctoral student, a national of an ASEAN Member State or Korea, enrolled at home, working on a social-science or humanities project about Southeast Asia that requires two or three months at a site in a country other than their own, with a host institution contact already in reach and a field season that works between late November and April.

Move down from that ideal and the case weakens in predictable ways: enrolment abroad, a single-country project centred on home, a technical project with thin social-science content, or a design that cannot survive a four-week mobilisation window. None of those is an automatic rejection, and the one-award-per-country structure means the competition you actually face is narrower than the regional scale suggests. But each is worth naming honestly in your own planning, because the committee has told you in advance exactly what it is weighing.

If the fit is there, the operative constraint is time. The deadline is 5 September 2026, and the two items you cannot produce alone — the host institution introduction and your enrolment paperwork — should be in motion today.