Darshana Baruah

Introduction

Ms Darshana M Baruah a visiting fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Tokyo, where she is working on a book about the significance of strategic islands in the Indian Ocean region. She is also a nonresident scholar with the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her primary research focuses on maritime security in Asia and the role of the Indian Navy in a new security architecture. Her work also examines the strategic implications of China’s infrastructure and connectivity projects as well as trilateral partnerships in the Indo-Pacific.

Previously, Ms Baruah was the associate director and a senior research analyst at Carnegie India, New Delhi, where she led the centre’s initiative on maritime security. Prior to Carnegie India, Baruah was with the maritime security initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, where she was the associate editor of the South China Sea Monitor. While at Carnegie India, Ms Baruah also coordinated and led various Track 1.5 dialogues and seminars. In 2018, Ms Baruah was a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) Tokyo. Prior to this, she was a 2016 national parliamentary fellow at the Australian parliament and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University (Canberra) and the Lowy Institute (Sydney), where her research was centered on India-Australia maritime collaboration in the Indo-Pacific.

Ms Baruah was awarded the programme d’invitations de personnalités d’avenir (broadly translates to “personalities of the future”) by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018 and was also named as the United Kingdom’s next generation foreign and security policy scholar for 2017.

Areas of Interest and Expertise

• Maritime Security and Naval Strategy
• Indian Ocean
• Indo-Pacific
• Role of Small Islands in Geopolitical Competition