Anshuman Behera

Dr Anshuman Behera is an Associate Professor and the Academic Head at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru. At the NIAS, he is associated with the Conflict Resolution and Peace Research Programme in the School of Conflict and Security Studies. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Malviya Centre for Peace Research, Banaras Hindu University and a Non-resident Visiting Fellow at the Centre for National Security Studies, Ramaiah University of Applied Science, Bengaluru. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Conflict Studies, Democracy, Development, Governance, and conflict, impact assessment of development projects and corporate social responsibilities, political theory, religious fundamentalism and terrorism in South Asia, internal security in India, and Natural resource management.

The important research projects that Dr Behera is presently conducting are: Impact assessment of the corporate social responsibility activities of the industries, especially the Oil India Limited (OIL) and the Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) in Assam. These studies evaluate the social, political and the economic impacts of OIL and the NRL on the society. Similarly, the research study on the Natural Resource Management, Utilisation and Adaptation investigates the social and the ecological aspects of resource management and utilisation in the Western and Eastern Ghats of India. The NIAS Democracy Forum (NDF), an academic initiative conducts training programmes, workshops, lecture series and evidence-based research on various aspects of federalism, local governance and democratic participation in India. As a part of this initiative, Dr. Behera also conducts research on the issues of formal and informal decentralisation in Manipur and Mizoram and the Maoist affected states in Central and Eastern India.  

He teaches courses on ‘Theoretical Constructs of Understanding Conflict’, ‘Qualitative Research Methodology in Social Sciences’, and ‘Approaches to Conflict Resolution’.