Radha Kumar

Radha Kumar is former Director General of the Delhi Policy Group and a specialist on ethnic conflict, peace and security. Earlier Director of the Mandela Centre for Peace at Jamia Millia Islamia University (2005-2010), Dr. Kumar was Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1999-2003), Associate Fellow at the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University (1996-8) and Executive Director of the Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly in Prague (1992-4). She has served as chair of the United Nations University Council and vice-chair of the UN Institute for Training and Research and is currently vice-chair of the board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). She was a member of the three-person Group of Interlocutors for Jammu and Kashmir appointed by the Government of India (2010-11), and is currently co-chair of the Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir. Dr. Kumar’s forthcoming book, The Republic Relearned: A Brief History of Indian Democracy, is due to be published in 2023. Her previous books include Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir (Aleph: 2018), A Gender Atlas of India (with Karthika Sudhir and Marcel Korff, Sage: 2018), (ed.) Negotiating Peace in Deeply Divided Societies: A Set of Simulations (Sage: 2009), Making Peace with Partition (Penguin: 2005), Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (Verso: 1997), and A History of Doing: Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1900-1990 (Kali for Women and Verso: 1993). Her articles have been published in Foreign Affairs, the EU Institute for Security Studies, the Centre for European Policy Studies, the World Policy Journal, the Brown Journal of World Affairs, the Indian Economic and Social History Review, and the Economic and Political Weekly. She is a frequent OpEd contributor. Among the honors she has received are the Warren Weaver fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC-Macarthur Post-Doctoral fellowship.