Priya Chacko

Priya Chacko is an Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of Adelaide. Prior to Adelaide, she worked at universities at Victoria University of Wellington and University of the Witwatersrand and was recently a non-resident fellow at the Perth-US Asia Centre and a visiting academic fellow at the Australia-India Institute.

She is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and was previously co-Editor-in Chief of Contemporary Politics. Her research focuses on how nationalism facilitates, and is used to justify, domestic and foreign policies; how the international (global capitalist processes, colonialism and imperialism, transnational knowledge production, geopolitics etc.) shapes domestic politics and political economy; and the structural role of ideology in capitalism. She has published widely on these topics with a focus on Indian politics and foreign policy and the Indo-Pacific region in journals like International Affairs, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Contemporary Asia.

Her current projects focus on 1) the rise and impact of authoritarian populist governance in India; 2) the transnational impact of autocratisation in India through strategies of transnational repression, legitimation, cooptation and cooperation; 3) the role of racial capitalism in shaping Australia’s international relations. She is a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on populist political mobilisation through digital technologies in the Indian and Turkish diasporas in Australia and a member of the Steering Committe of the Exclusionary Regimes and Autocratisation Hub of the Open Society University Network Forum on Democracy and Devlopment.