Prof. Dr. Dewi Fortuna Anwar, M.A. was born in Bandung on 22 May 1958. In 1981, she obtained a BA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, specialising in the history of South-East Asia. In 1982, Dewi obtained an MA in South East Asian Area Studies from SOAS, University of London, majoring in politics and minoring in economics and anthropology. Her thesis at the time was entitled “The Ka’ba and the Garuda: The Dilemma of Islam in Indonesian Politics”. She continued her studies at the Department of Politics and History, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and obtained her PhD in 1990.
Dewi served as Assistant to the Minister of State for Political Affairs and Globalisation during the administration of President B.J. Habibie, and as Deputy to the Vice-President for Political Affairs whilst Budiono was Vice-President and Jusuf Kalla has held the office of Vice-President to the present day.
Dewi previously served as Deputy for Social and Human Sciences at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) from 2001 to 2010. She has been a researcher at the Centre for Political Research at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (P2P-LIPI) since 1983. Dewi was awarded the title of Senior Researcher in 1998 and was appointed Research Professor in 2006. Dewi also served as Director of Programmes and Research at The Habibie Centre from 1999 to 2010. Since 2000, she has been a member of the Board of Directors of CIDES.
She has frequently served as a visiting researcher on a number of research projects. Among other things, he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. In September 2002, he was also a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Dewi has been a member of AIPI since 2015, specialising in foreign policy. Her academic work has been widely published in political science journals.