The Politics of Security in India

Biography:  Arkaja Singh is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and a part of the recently formed State Capacity Initiative at CPR, where she is responsible for developing a new program of research on state capacity in Indian cities. Her areas of interest include municipal government, informal settlements, land, water and sanitation (and especially the issues around sanitation labor and manual scavenging.) Arkaja recently completed a study of state response to India’s ‘crisis of hunger’ brought about by the CoVID-19 pandemic, considering issues of ‘state capacity’ in the organization and delivery of the response. Other recent work includes a study of federal relations in the context of water governance in India. She has previously over a decade of experience in development sector consulting and research.

Biography: Brian Turnbull is a Visiting Instructor of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, focusing on comparative politics and American government. He holds a PhD in political science with a focus in comparative politics and international relations from the University of Kansas. Prior, he received his MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University. His research agenda focuses on the use of gender quotas to improve representational equality in the global South. Dr. Turnbull conducted Fulbright-funded fieldwork in India, where he gathered interviews from city councilors in Jaipur, Rajsathan. He participated in the Faculty Development Seminar India (Council of American Overseas Research Centers).   Dr. Turnbull’s research and teaching interests are in democratic representation, gender and politics, South Asian politics, and ethnic conflict. His scholarship has been published in journals such as Qualitative Research and Journal of International Women’s Studies.

Biography: Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra holds a PhD in Conflict resolution from the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA and a PhD in International Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His areas of interest include ethnoreligious conflicts, peacebuilding, global south, and India. He has published several books including Conflict Management in Kashmir (Cambridge UP), Gandhi and the World (Lexington), and Conflict and Peace in Eurasia (Routledge). His articles have appeared in journals such as Geopolitics, Regional and Federal Studies, and Sage Research Methods Cases. He has taught and researched at the Central University of Punjab, the University of Mumbai and the University of Jammu, India. He received the Scholar of Peace Award (New Delhi) in 2007 and Kodikara Award for Young South Asian Researcher (Colombo) in 2010. He was a Visiting Fellow at Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast, UK; Charles Wallace Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast; and ICSSR-RAS Fellow at Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow. He has worked as a consultant for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Geneva. Mahapatra is currently an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Florida, and at Valencia College, Florida. He is also associated with the Center for Peace, Development and Democracy, University of Massachusetts Boston as Fellow and with the International Mediating and Negotiating Operational Agency (EPOS), Rome, Italy as a Senior Research Fellow.

Biography:  Shyam Tekwani is professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies where he specializes in political violence, terrorism and counterterrorism; security dynamics of South Asia and the role of media in security. Tekwani has authored and co-authored several books, book chapters, articles and opinion pieces including Media and Conflict Reporting in Asia; “Online Networks of Terrorist Groups and their Implications for Security”; “The Internet in the 2004 Sri Lankan Elections”; “Two Indias: The Role of the Internet in the 2004 National Elections”; and “The Media, Information Revolution and Terrorism in Southeast Asia.” Tekwani’s extensive background in the media as a journalist reporting conflict and insurgency in the Indo-Asia Pacific includes his exclusive reportage of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. His move to academics converged with the parallel shift of insurgencies and propaganda to the Internet in the early-90s and his early academic work focused on the use of new media technologies by terrorists and insurgent groups. He has taught courses and lectured widely across countries at universities and institutions, including the last decade at the School of Communication Studies in the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A native of India, Professor Tekwani earned a B.A. (Honors) in history and comparative religion from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and an MFA  in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

Biography: Sanjib Baruah is a Professor of Political Studies at Bard College. He holds a BA from Cotton College, Guwahati, India; an MA from the University of Delhi, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Baruah’s teaching and research interests include political economy, nations and nationalism, Asian borderlands, and South Asian Politics. His publications include India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality; Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India; Postfrontier Blues: Towards a New Policy Framework for Northeast India; and the edited volumes Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India; and Ethnonationalism in India: A Reader. His opinion pieces appear in the Indian Express and other newspapers. Baruah serves on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Indian Politics and the book series South Asia in Motion from Stanford University Press. He holds a concurrent position as Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway.

Biography: Rochisha Narayan is a historian of Early Modern and Modern South Asia. She is interested in exploring histories of family, community, social protests, colonialism and capital through the lenses of gender, sexuality and law. She is completing her book manuscript, tentatively titled, ‘Agents of Capital: Widows, Family, Community and Law in Early Colonial India’. It examines relationships of property during the 18th and early 19th century to show that transfers of capital were political concerns involving household, community and state. The book traces the ways in which early colonial law gained shape, and was established as an authority in 18th-century society, by mediating matters of inheritance. It explores how the colonial economy defined property relationships in this period and British interventions through law tethered household and community transactions in its service.  One of the core arguments of the book is to show how these 18th-century practices of vernacular capitalism were gendered. The book focuses on the pursuits of female political and commercial actors in the transition to colonial rule. Challenging narratives which cast widows as fragile and marginal victims of culture, this project draws attention to elite and non-elite widows as agentive and entrepreneurial figures who strove to maintain a stake in colonial economy by sourcing capital and support in community spaces, and colonial offices.

In addition to this research, Dr. Narayan has begun preliminary research on a second project which is tentatively titled, “The Politics of Belonging: Family Histories in Vernacular Genealogies and the Colonial Archive in India”. This research will examine the production of genealogy and family history as contingent practices of status formation, negotiation and control in northern India from the 18th to the 20th century.

Biography:  Shekhawat is a social scientist with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Jammu in India. Her research and teaching interests include conflict, peace and gender, and her regional focus lies in India and South Asia. She has published several books, including Gender, Conflict, and Peace in Kashmir (Cambridge UP), Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace (Palgrave Macmillan), and Women and Borders: Refugees, Migrants, Communities (I.B. Tauris). Shekhawat has presented papers and delivered public lectures in various parts of the world, including France, Germany, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines and the United States. Most recently she delivered a talk on women warriors at the Learning Institute for the Elderly (LIFE) at the University of Central Florida. Shekhawat is a recipient of the Scholar of Peace Award (Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace, New Delhi), the Berghof Foundation Fellowship (Berlin) and the International Peace Research Association Foundation Fellowship (USA). She has previously conducted research and taught at the Universities of Jammu and Mumbai, India. She has also been a consultant to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Norwegian Refugee Council. Her experience also includes working as a consultant for the Conflict and Peace Studies Center, Kathmandu and EPOS, Rome. She was the guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Internal Displacement, which focused on displaced women. She is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Internal Displacement, and Research Papers, the journal of the Human Rights Conflict Prevention Centre, University of Bihac, Bosnia. Moreover, she is a member of several organizations, including Dignity and Humiliation Studies, Action Asia and Women in War.

Biography: Anup Phayal is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His scholarly interests lie at the intersection of International Relations and Comparative Politics, focusing on political violence and post-conflict peace building. His research has been published in journals such as International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Global Security Studies. He has also published reports and policy papers for the Asia Foundation. Phayal holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kentucky and Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics, UK, and Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Prior to joining UNC Wilmington, he held a post-doctoral position at the Baker Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Biography: Sambuddha Ghatak is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State University. Sambuddha received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Tennessee in 2014. His research interests include International Relations: Intrastate Conflict; Politics of Terrorism; International Conflict; International Organizations; International Relations Theory, Comparative Politics: Politics of Developing Nations; South Asian Politics; Government and Politics of India. Before joining the Department of Justice Studies in 2017, he was a lecturer at the University of Tennessee since 2014. He has taught a wide range of classes, including Terrorism, Conflict Processes, and American Government and Politics. Ghatak has published on the subjects of terrorism and human rights in journals such as Journal of Conflich Resolution, Conflict Management and Science, International Interactions and Terrorism, and Political Violence.

Biography: Roger Handberg, Professor of Political Science in  School of Politics, Security & International Affairs, works in the areas of science and technology policy with primary focus on space policy both military and civilian. His more recent work has focused on space policy as a developmental tool. His publications include 170 plus articles and nine books, most recently on international space commerce and the Chinese space program. His work on India is part of a larger project examining global impact of China, India and Japan on future of the global space community.