Introduction

Professor Rahul Mukherji is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg University. He is currently the Executive Director of the South Asia Institute. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.

Professor Mukherji is a leading scholar in political science and international relations with a focus on South Asian materials. He has taught at the National University of Singapore, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), Hunter College (New York) and the University of Vermont (Burlington). He is also a Senior Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Social Sciences in New Delhi, and co-chair of the China-India workshop at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Professor Mukherji serves on the board of prestigious journals such as India Review, Pacific Affairs, and Governance and co-edits a book series titled Institutions and Development in South Asia with Oxford University Press.

He has co-authored India Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2011, Portuguese translation 2014), with Professor Sumit Ganguly, and has also written Political Economy of Reforms in India (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Globalization and Deregulation: Ideas, Interests and Institutional Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2014). His recent publications include ‘Policy Paradigms and Path Dependence: The Endogenous Roots of Institutional Displacement and Drift in India’ in the Global Public Policy and Governance (2021); ‘Governing India: Evolution of Programmatic Welfare in Andhra Pradesh’ in the Studies in Indian Politics (2020)’ and ‘Democracy vs. Covid: India’s Illiberal Remedy’ in the Journal of Democracy (2020).

Areas of Interest and Expertise

• Comparative Politics
• Governance and Development
• Political Economy
• International Relations
• South Asia