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Mohanan Bhaskaran Pillai Professor and Dean, School of Law, and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India

Mohanan Bhaskaran Pillai teaches at the Department of Politics and International Studies of Pondicherry University and coordinates the UGC Special Assistance Programme in the Department. He is a teacher and researcher of 39 years’ standing. Currently, he is the Dean, School of Law, Pondicherry University, and Chairman of the Department of Politics and International studies of Pondicherry University on a second term. He has served previously as Director of the UNESCO Madanjeeth Singh Institute of South Asia Regional Cooperation and Chairman, Centre for South Asian Studies of Pondicherry University. He has also served as Principal of Pondicherry University’s Community Colleges located at Lawspet, Puducherry, and Mahe, Puducherry. His areas of specialization include South Asian studies, research methodology and international political economy. He has been a visiting professor at Paris 13 University and lectured at the University of Warsaw, Poland.

Over the years, he has earned a reputation as an institution builder in recognition of his role in setting up Pondicherry University’s Campus at Mahe, an outlying region of Puducherry, and serving as the founder Head of the Mahe Centre. He is the Founder Editor of the Institute for the Study of Developing Areas (ISDA) journal—Studies in Development and Public Policy—and the flagship journal of Pondicherry University—The International Journal of South Asian Studies.

He was a recipient of the Middle Career Award of the American Studies Research Centre at Hyderabad (currently renamed as Indo-American Centre for International Studies) in 1988. He received travel grants from the International Studies Association to attend its annual conference held at San Francisco in March 2018. He has been nominated as Chair of the Panel on Disaster Diplomacy, and Discussant in the Panel on Historical Issues in India’s Foreign Policy at the annual conference of the International Studies Association in March 2020 at Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Apart from the above accolades, he has been honoured for his paper on ‘Indian Strategic Culture: The Debates in Perspectives’ being accepted for presentation at the conference in the panel on Indian Philosophy as a site for theorizing IR.

He has authored and edited more than 10 books and published research papers in national and international journals of repute. His publications include The Politics of Regionalism in South Asia, India’s Foreign Policy: Continuity and Change, and India’s National Security: Concerns and Strategies. He has received multiple citations for his research papers. His hobbies are reading fiction and painting.