South Asian Voices (www.southasianvoices.org), a project of the Stimson Center, is a website featuring commentary and debate from a generation of rising strategic analysts in India and Pakistan. Articles cover a variety of issues, including Indian and Pakistani external relations, India-Pakistan nuclear dynamics, nuclear security, energy issues, political events, and non-traditional security concerns. Stimson selects from among the authors four visiting fellows every year for a one-month visiting fellowship in Washington.
Rabia Akhtar and Jayita Sarkar were part of the first cohort of South Asian Voices Visiting Fellows at the Stimson Center in July 2014. “Pakistan, India, and China after the U.S. Drawdown from Afghanistan: A Visiting Fellow Report” is the product of this fellowship.
Rabia Akhtar is a Ph.D Candidate in the Security Studies Department at Kansas State University. Her dissertation is titled “The Counter Narrative: U.S. Non-Proliferation Policy towards Pakistan from Ford to Clinton”’ She is conducting a foreign policy analysis of executive-legislative interactions in U.S. foreign policy making and related issues in Congressional oversight of U.S. foreign policy towards Pakistan during the course of its nuclear weapons development. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has recently published a Policy Studies Paper for the Regional Center of Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo, Sri Lanka on “Nuclear Learning in South Asia: The Levels of Analysis.”
Jayita Sarkar is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where she is completing a book manuscript on Franco-Indian nuclear relations and U.S. nonproliferation efforts during the Cold War. She has held visiting research positions at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi among others. Dr. Sarkar currently teaches Peace and Conflict Studies at Stonehill College, and holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute Geneva.