Dr. Samir Kumar DAS is Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. Previously the Vice-Chancellor of the University of North Bengal, and a PostDoctoral Fellow (2005) of the Social Science Research Council (South Asia Program) based in New York, he is the Coordinator of the University Grants CommissionDepartmental Research Support (UGC-DRS) Programme (Phase II & Phase III)) on Democratic Governance: Comparative Perspectives‘. He served as an Adjunct Professor of Government at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University (2014), a Visiting Professor of the North East India Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi in 2015 and at the Universite 13 Sorbonne Paris Cite in 2016 among many of his assignments. He specializes in and writes on issues of ethnicity, identity, security, migration, rights and justice and has contributed over 190 research papers to highly esteemed national and international journals and edited volumes. Besides, he has been a regular reviewer of some of the top journals, publishing houses and research bodies including Minority Rights International (London), EU-India Social Science and Humanities Platform (Ljubljana)) and European Research Council (Brussels) etc