• Co-founder and coordinator, SEASREP (Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program) Foundation, an organization of Southeast Asian scholars aimed at promoting Southeast Asian studies in the region, since 1995
• Chair, National Historical Commission of the Philippines, 2011-2016
• Consultant, Technical Advisory Committee for Promoting Inter-cultural Dialogue and a Culture of Peace in Southeast Asia through Shared Histories, UNESCO Bangkok, 2015-2019
• Member, International Advisory Committee, Sojourn, refereed bi-annual journal of the Regional Social and Cultural Studies program, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2002-2012
• Member, Steering Committee, South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), international program funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Development Cooperation to encourage social scientists in Africa, Latin America and Asia to do comparative historical research, 2003-2008

(b. 1941) Trained in Composition and Conducting at the University of the Philippines, got his Master of Music degree at Indiana University and his Ph.D. degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was a full fellow at the Summer Courses in New Music at Darmstadt, Germany, and undertook post-graduate work in Ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois under grants from the Ford Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council.  He was Chair and now Member of Honor of the Asian Composers League and elected Vice President of the International Music Council at UNESCO from 2001 to 2005, the first Filipino in the five-person Praesidium of the highest governing body of the international music community. He was awarded National Artist for Music in 2014.

• His compositions-commissioned and performed locally and internationally-incorporate ‘western’ and Asian aesthetics
• Has conducted extensive research on Philippine and Southeast Asian musical and aesthetic traditions, which he incorporates in his compositions
• Has published extensively on Philippine and Southeast Asian musical traditions, including Laon Laon: Perspectives on Transmission and Pedagogy of Musical Traditions in Post-colonial Southeast Asia (2012) and Sonic Orders in ASEAN Musics (2003)
• Held leadership positions in the University, local civil society organizations and international organizations, including the International Music Council
• Organized international festivals promoting Southeast Asian performance traditions, most notably the International Rondalla Festivals and Gongs and Bamboo Festival
• Led the Philippine delegation and was Director of the ASEAN Youth Music camps and Composers Forums, and Asian Composers League Festivals
• Works on the preservation of Asian music—past and present—through the Laon-Laon forum
• Has given keynote and plenary lectures in international conferences such as the International Society for Music Education

His contributions in the current social sciences to date can be put into four categories: (1) His early works on the post-colonial states of Southeast Asia. The most important book in this category is Democracy and Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia which was published in English by Macmillan in 1997. (2) The second cluster of his works is also about the post-colonial condition targeted at the latent eurocentrism of social sciences. The seminal work on this topic is Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science, published by Sage in 2006. (3) Inter-religious dialogue, particularly, in Southeast Asian societies is another recurrent theme of his works. An Islamic Perspective on the Commitment to Inter-Religious Dialogue is the most recent in that series which has been published in Malaysia. (4) Finally, some of the well-received and intellectually acclaimed works of Alatas are his recent two books and a few papers on rereading The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun (a Muslim and medieval precursor of a discipline that Aguste Comte four hundred years later called sociology). 

List of Selected Publications:

• Ibn Khaldun (Makers of Islamic Civilization), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology, Routledge, 2014.
• An Islamic Perspective on the Commitment to Inter-Religious Dialogue, Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia, 2008.
• Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism, Delhi: Sage, 2006.
• Democracy and Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State, Macmillan, 1997.
• The post-colonial state: Dual functions in the public sphere (Department of Sociology working papers), National University of Singapore, 1994.
• Asian Inter-Faith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion (edited), Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs, 2003.
• Asian Anthropology, edited with Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-Ari, Routledge, 2005.

Excerpts from: https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/alatas-syed-farid/