Bio

I am an author, strategic analyst and consultant on Great Power Politics, Space Policy, Alternate Futures, and Frameworks of Conflict Negotiation and Resolution. I have also conducted extensive work on ethnic conflicts and border disputes. After earning my Ph.D. in international relations, I served for nearly a decade at India’s Ministry of Defense (MOD) sponsored think tank, the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi, working on ethnic conflicts in India’s Northeast and China-India border conflict. I have been a visiting fellow at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway; the La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; and the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2012, I was selected to serve as a Jennings-Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Washington D.C. and was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellowship that same year. Shortly after establishing my own strategy and policy consultancy, I won the prestigious MINERVA grant awarded by the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense (OSD) to study great power competition. I was also awarded a contract with Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), to work on a project on “ISIS in South and Southeast Asia”. I was the first representative from South Asia chosen to participate in the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies NATO Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC) ‘Emerging Security Challenges Working Group.’ I also received the Executive Leadership Certificate sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, National Defense University (NDU), and the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS). Two of my books, one on The Naga Ethnic Movement for a Separate Homeland: Stories from the Field published by Oxford University Press, and the other, a co-authored book on Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space published by Lexington Press, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield in 2020. Currently I am working on a book project (2020-2021) on ''China's Grand Strategy and The Notion of Territoriality and Resources'' and a second project (2020-2022) on conceptualizing a space power matrix answering a key question: what makes a country a space power?