Today at Brown

One of the country’s premier scholars of South Asian politics and ethnic conflict, Ashutosh Varshney, will join the Brown faculty as a professor of political science in January 2009.

For a decade and a half, Varshney has studied peace and conflict in India and other developing countries. While his early work examined questions of political economy, in the early 1990s, Varshney felt a strong “intellectual desire” to “plunge into a field where the view of human life was fuller and not confined to economic rationality.” He soon began focusing on ethnocommunal conflict in India and the role of emotions, religious beliefs, and commitments to larger causes in political life.

He concentrated on Hindu-Muslim conflict, asking why Hindu-Muslim riots were endemic in some Indian cities while Hindus and Muslims co-existed quite peacefully in other cities. Varshney says the final answer was surprising: “The peace of non-violent cities was founded on Hindu-Muslim integration in business associations, unions, political parties, middle-class professional organizations, (what scholars and activists have come to call ‘civil society’) and the violence of riot-prone towns stemmed from the absence of such civic integration.”

His research was published in Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life; Hindus and Muslims in India (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the American Political Science Association’s Gregory Luebbert award for the best book in comparative politics. Varshney’s work also led to a multicountry research program, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named a Carnegie Scholar earlier this year.

In the late 1970s, Varshney earned a master’s degree in political science and master’s of philosophy from India’s University of Allahabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at MIT in 1990, where he received the Daniel Lerner Prize for Best Dissertation.

Varshney comes to Brown from the University of Michigan, where he has been since 2001. He’s held previous teaching posts at Harvard, Notre Dame, and Columbia and has served on former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Millennium Task Force on Poverty and the South Asia Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations.