A.K. (Aditya Kiran) Kakati, Dr

I am a lecturer at the International Relations and International Organizations (IRIO) department, and formerly taught at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen. I teach courses in international relations, anthropology, history and historical anthropology. I currently lead two multidisciplinary, externally funded research projects: a Wenner-Gren Foundation-supported monograph on the Second World War and the transformation of governance and borders in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, and a Delta on the Move Foundation project on war objects and memories in Eastern Nagaland and the Myanmar borderlands.

I am a Senior Research Associate & Programme Lead (Global Research, Outreach and Capacity-Building) at The Highland Institute, Kohima, and Associate Editor of The Highlander Journal. I co-founded the Healing through Humanity Network and co-edits IIAS's Global Health Matters blog. A Pranic Healer, he teaches Twin Heart Meditation workshops in Leiden.

I am a doctorate in International History and (with Minor in Anthropology and Sociology), from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID). My postdoctoral projects studied the historical production of "remoteness" at intellectual, spatial, and socio-cultural levels and how these shaped long-term governance and sovereignty contests in the India-Myanmar (Burma) border-regions. My previous work was based on an ethnographic project, Eating Ethnic Enclaves, which studied cultural encounters in liminal eating spaces due to migrations from the Eastern Himalayan Region. The research was on the emergence of ethnic cuisine, restaurant and labor shaping cultural identity politics, social conflicts and relations arising from minority community migrations from borderland conflict zones within India. I am co-editing a volume that republishes a rare manuscript by Banikanta Kakati titled, Vishnuite Myths and Legends, in an attempt to situate this work in the contemporary political and intellectual historical milieu of India and its Northeast.

I am a former Fellowship holder and am currently still affiliated as a researcher at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. I had a research grant from the the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for doing research at the University of Amsterdam and the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, followed by a brief stint at the FMSH in Paris.

I previously visited as a fellow at Princeton University and the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Oxford University-Europaem program. I am currently engaged with projects with the Highland Institute, Nagaland. Aditya hails from Assam in India, and completed his undergraduate studies in History from St Stephen’s College, New Delhi and a MA in International History from Geneva.