Politics

Mukulika Banerjee

Associate Professor in Anthropology

Dr Mukulika’s Banerjee 's current research interests are on the cultural meanings of democracy. Her most recent publication is Why India Votes? (2014) in which she explores the reasons behind India's rising trends of voter participation. She is currently completing a manuscript based on 15 years of engagement with a village in India to explain the sources of democratic thinking in Indian social life. Dr Banerjee was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford in 1994 based on field research in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (North West Frontier Province). It was published as her first book, The Pathan Unarmed (2001); she has co-authored  The Sari (2003), a book on the modernity of fashion, and edited Muslim Portraits (2007), a collection of 12 Muslim life-stories in South Asia.

Alpa Shah

Associate Professor in Anthropology

Dr Shah's research and writing focuses on poor and marginalised people in India and Nepal. She explores the processes of inequality people get caught in and the various ways in which they try to subvert them. She has lived for several years as an anthropologist amidst the people she writes about. Her first book, In the Shadows of the State, was on the indigenous rights and politics of Adivasis in Jharkhand, India. Shah is currently writing a book on India’s Naxalite or Maoist movement, a more than 40-year-old insurgency trying to seize power of the state to create a communist society. She has presented some of this research on BBC Radio 4. Shah is also leading the Programme of Research on Inequality and Poverty, funded by major research grants from the ESRC and the EU. She read Geography at Cambridge, trained in Anthropology at the LSE, and taught anthropology at Goldsmiths until 2013 when she returned to the LSE.

Julie King

Researcher, LSE Cities

Julia King is an architectural designer and urban researcher at LSE Cities. At LSE Cities she has worked on ‘Super-diverse streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK Cities’ and is currently working on initiatives in India. Her research is concerned with housing, sanitation infrastructure, urban planning, and participatory design processes. She has won numerous awards including a Holcim Award (2011), SEED Award for ‘Excellence in Public Interest Design’ (2014), Emerging Woman Architect of the Year (2014) and short listed for the World Design Impact Prize (2013) and the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award (2014). She has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Architectural Association and the CASS, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design; where she recently completed her PhD-by-practice titled ‘Incremental Cities: Discovering the Sweet Spot for making town-within-a-city’ which looked at resettlement colonies in Delhi, India. Julia also teaches on the MSc City Design and Social Science.

Kalpana Wilson 

Senior LSE Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development

Dr Wilson is Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development at the Gender Institute. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the experiences of women in rural labour movements in South Asia, the appropriation of feminist concepts within neoliberal approaches, the ways in which race is inscribed within discourses and practices of development, and the involvement of South Asian diasporas in development. Some of her recent research explores how gendered and racialised constructions of women's 'agency' have been elaborated within the framework of a neoliberal model of development. This work also draws on research on the experiences, approaches and perceptions of mainly Dalit women involved in agricultural labour movements in Bihar, India.

Romola Sanyal

Assistant Professor of Urban Geography 

Dr Sanyal is Assistant Professor in Urban Geography. She is interested in issues of urbanisation, housing and citizenship rights. Her research has looked at the politics of developing refugee camps and colonies in Lebanon and India focusing primarily on refugees from 1947 and 1948. She has published several articles on this. Her interest in questions of citizenship, particularly in India, led to the publication of her co-edited book Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities (Sage, 2011). Her recent work has ranged from looking at border politics to the aestheticisation of slums in South Asia.

Sumantra Bose

Professor of Government

Sumantra Bose is a scholar of comparative politics and international relations. His work includes several acclaimed books, including publications on the roots of conflict in Kashmir. His latest book, ‘Transforming India: Challenges to the World's Largest Democracy’, analyses the regionalisation of India’s politics and argues that third-generation Naxalism and Kashmir Valley unrest can be understood through the lens of regional identity and aspirations. Professor Bose is a citizen of India, where he spends a considerable proportion of his time.

Patrick Dunleavy

Professor of Political Science and Public Policy

Professor Dunleavy’s research interests include the development of public sector IT systems and other large-scale, modern public policy systems; analyses of public sector productivity, citizen redress and policy evaluation; rational choice theories of bureaucracy; the design of large-scale electoral systems; and modern political theory. He is also interested in electoral analysis and party politics, especially relating to the new concept of 'competition space'. Dr Dunleavy’s current work contrasts the electoral systems in India, the United Kingdom and the United States with proportional representation systems.

Professor of Development Studies

Professor Corbridge works on politics and development with a focus both on cross-country comparisons and the political economy of India. He has worked recently on questions of participation, accountability and governance in eastern India. Dr Corbridge’s other recent work on India includes articles on post-Partition Hindu-Muslim violence, economic transformations, and employment assurance schemes.

Tim Forsyth

Professor of Environment and Development

Professor Forsyth specialises in political approaches to environmental change and international development. His research focuses on two key themes: The politics and governance of science and expertise within policy processes, especially for highly contested problems occurring in rapidly developing societies such as India; and the development of deliberative, multi-stakeholder forms of governance that can result in more development-friendly and environmentally effective policy solutions. Prof. Forsyth is currently conducting research on environmental and climate change policy, civil society and governance in several East Asian countries as well as India.

Jude Howell

Professor in International Development

Professor Howell research focuses on the politics of aid and development policy, civil society, governance, and aid and security. She also has experience of gender, labour relations and the politics of policy processes. Professor Howell published on the impact in India of counter-terrorism policies post-9/11.

Shirin Madon

Assistant Professor of Information Systems

Dr Madon has researched the impact of ICTs on government reform initiatives in India for more than 15 years. Her current research studies the development impact of a selection of e-governance projects in India. These projects relate to ICT usage for improving the administration and planning of rural development programmes, e-services applications, telecentre projects, and health information systems.

Mahvish Shami

Assistant Professor

Dr Shami’s research focuses on patron-client relationships established between peasants and their landlords. While historically landlords’ exploitative powers are argued to stem from the level of inequality in the rural economy, her research in Pakistan shows that it is the interaction of inequality with isolation that limits peasants exit options and creates a monopolist/monopsonist landlord. Dr Shami is currently exploring the types of collective action projects peasants undertake in villages with varying levels of connectivity.

Rajesh Venugopal

Assistant Professor in International Development

Dr Venugopal’s primary research interests are in the political sociology of development and violent conflict, particularly with reference to South Asia. He has researched and written on post-conflict reconstruction, nationalism, development aid, private sector development, and liberal peacebuilding. His recent publications on Sri Lanka explore the politics of market reform during conflict, post-conflict economics, and military fiscalism.

Adnan Khan

Deputy Executive Director, International Growth Centre

Adnan Khan is Deputy Executive Director and Research network Director of the IGC. His research interests lie in the areas of public economics and political economy. Khan’s is involved in an IGC research project to assess the role of wages, incentives, and audit on tax inspectors’ behaviour in Punjab, Pakistan.

Taylor C. Sherman 

Associate Professor of International History

Dr Sherman's research concerns the cultural and political history of India in the transition from colonial rule to independence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Her research explores conceptions of citizenship, belonging and the idea of the minority in Indian politics; Arab and Afghan migration to and from India; early postcolonial democracy and the first elections; language politics, multilingualism and the creation of linguistic states; and violence and criminal justice in South Asia. Her first book was both a study of the many techniques of state coercion and a cultural history of the ways in which Indians imbue practices of punishment with their own meaning. She is currently working on a manuscript for a monograph on notions of citizenship amongst Muslims in early postcolonial India.

Tomila Lankina

Associate Professor in International Relations

Dr Lankina’s current research focuses on the historical influences on sub-national democracy and authoritarianism in India and Russia. In particular, Dr Lankina explores the imperial and colonial human capital legacies and their developmental and democracy effects in these settings by analysing sub-national data that she has gathered. She has also recently published on the impact of Christian missionaries on India’s democratic development, finding that Christian missions operating throughout India influenced post-colonial democracy by promoting education, particularly female literacy.

Mara Malagodi

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Malagodi’s research interests include law and conflict, human rights, and comparative constitution law in South Asia. Her current research investigates patterns of exclusion of Nepal’s ethnolinguistic, religious and regional groups, dalits, women and LGBTs in the constitutional arena following the re-democratisation of 1990 by mapping Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the Right to Equality.

David Lewis

Professor of Social Policy and Development

Professor Lewis’ research focuses on Bangladesh's politics and society, and particularly on how the country has been impacted by four decades of international development policies. His PhD research was based on fieldwork that explored the social and economic dimensions of village level technological change in agriculture during the late 1980s and he has regularly undertaken research in the region ever since. In 2011 he published Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press). David Lewis has also worked extensively on the roles of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society actors in South Asia—mainly in Bangladesh but also in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. An anthropologist by background, he has strong interests in ethnographic appraches to the study of organisations and policy processes. His most recent book is Anthropology and Development: Challenges For the 21st Century' (with Katy Gardner, Pluto, 2015).