He was elected to a Christensen Fellowship at St Catherine's College, Oxford University in 2012. In 2012–13, he was appointed to the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professorship in International Relations at Rhodes University, South Africa. In 2016, he was appointed to be the Inaugural Boeing Company Chair in International Relations in the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University. In 2016, Acharya was awarded the prestigious Odisha Living Legend Award from the Odisha Diary Foundation in his native state of Odisha and delivered the Living Legend Oration at Bhubaneswar. He has received two Distinguished Scholar awards from the International Studies Association: one from the Global South Caucus in 2016, and another from the International Organization section in 2018. Acharya's major research interests include the diffusion of ideas and norms in world politics, and constructivist International Relations (IR) theory more generally; comparative regionalism, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); and contributions to IR theory and practice from the Global South, or Global IR. Acharya's research combines and cuts across these different topics, often touching upon multiple themes in a single work. Acharya's principal contributions that advance constructivist IR theory are the concepts of norm localization and norm subsidiarity. Constructivism has traditionally accorded more importance to the role of ideas and norms in international politics compared to realism and liberalism. However, Acharya points out that most constructivists conceive of ideas as spreading outward from the West (or the Global North) to the “Rest” (or the Global South). Acharya challenges this story of unidirectional norm diffusion by showing how “local” beliefs and practices also matter. Using case studies from ASEAN, Acharya highlights how Southeast Asian leaders did not just accept transnational norms as is. Rather, where such transnational norms were in line with prior local beliefs, or “cognitive priors,” they were successfully “localized.” This is exemplified in how the ASEAN states localized the “common security” norm of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe into “cooperative security” as manifested in the ASEAN Regional Forum. While the cooperative security norm recognized the need for inclusive regional security cooperation, it rejected the legalistic and domestic politics aspects of the common security norm, in line with the basic tenets of the ASEAN Way. While norm localization emphasizes the agency of local actors in adapting prevailing transnational norms, norm subsidiarity is concerned with the creation of new norms by local actors.