Salvador Santino Regilme

Salvador Santino Regilme (born 1986) is a Dutch International Relations scholar and political scientist focusing on international human rights norms, global governance, democratization, United States foreign policy, and foreign aid. He is a tenured Associate Professor of International Relations based at the Institute of History within the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, the Netherlands.

He is one of the world's leading International Relations scholar on human rights and global development, with his award-winning research on the impact of post-Cold War United States foreign aid on human rights and state repression in the Global South.

Previously, he worked as a Käte Hamburger Fellow on global cooperation based in Germany (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), as a Fox International Fellow at the MacMillan Center for Area and International Studies at Yale University, and he briefly held a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of International Relations within the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University, USA. He was also a visiting researcher at the Comparative Constitutionalism Group of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany Regilme won the 2022 Individual Fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam.

Education
Graduating from De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines with a B.A. in philosophy (minor in development studies and political science), magna cum laude, he received in 2011 his M.A. in Democratic Governance and Civil Society from the Universität Osnabrück and a Joint PhD in Political Science and North American Studies in 2015 from the Freie Universität Berlin, with joint supervision at Yale University He studied Political Science and International Relations on a Fox Fellowship at Yale University, and he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Global Cooperation Research at the Universität Duisburg-Essen.

He completed his secondary school education as a scholar of Franciscan Capuchins at Lourdes School, Quezon City. He is the first Philippines-born scholar to complete a joint PhD in Political Science and American Studies and the first Philippines-born scholarship recipient of the prestigious "Helmut-Schmidt Program" (formerly Public Policy and Good Governance), which allowed him to earn a German-language diploma from the Goethe-Institut Göttingen and a MA from the Universität Osnabrück.

Regilme completed his PhD under the supervision of Lora Anne Viola (chair), Thomas Risse, and Susan D. Hyde through a joint supervision from Freie Universität Berlin and Yale University, funded by the German Research Foundation's Excellence Initiative and the Fox International Fellowship at Yale University.

Publications
He is the author of Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia, published by the University of Michigan Press, 2021, co-editor of the volume Human Rights at Risk: International Institutions, American Power, and the Future of Dignity (Rutgers University Press), co-editor of American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers (Routledge, 2017) and the author of many peer-reviewed articles in leading journals such as Political Geography, International Studies Perspectives, Third World Quarterly, Geoforum, International Political Science Review, and Human Rights Review, among many others.

Awards
Regilme's book Aid Imperium is the recipient of the 2023 Cecil B. Currey Book Award from the Association of Global South Studies and the 2023-2024 Best Book in Human Rights - Honorable Mention from the International Studies Association. Regilme is the 2019 Inaugural Winner of the Best Conference Paper Award for the Asia-Pacific of the International Studies Association, for his paper on the international human rights regime and the Trump administration. In 2022, he received Honorable Mention for the Best Scholarly Article Award in Human Rights from American Sociological Association for his paper on the global war on drugs in Colombia and the Philippines. He is the first non-German Fox International Fellow from the Freie Universität Berlin to Yale University. He is the recipient of several fellowships and grants from the German Federal and State Governments, German Academic Exchange Service, Yale University, De La Salle University-Manila, and Leiden University. In 2012, Regilme was named as one of the 100 Leaders of Tomorrow at the 42nd St. Gallen Symposium, held at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Media
Regilme has appeared in several international media outlets, including Deutsche Welle and TRT World.