Rita Manchanda

Rita Manchanda is Adjunct Professor at Chanakya National Law School, Patna. She previously served for fifteen years as Executive Director of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights in Kathmandu. She has also worked as a consultant with UN Women, a gender advisor to the Commonwealth Technical Fund, a founding member of the Women’s Regional Network, a board member of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and the Sanchal Foundation, and co-chair of the Pakistan India Forum for Peace and Democracy.

Rita is a feminist scholar, author and advocate for human rights, peace and social justice in South Asia. Her work has paid particular attention to the rights of vulnerable and marginalised groups, including women and religious and ethnic minorities. She has made major contributions to debates on gender, security and foreign policy through publications such as Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (2001), Women and the Politics of Peace in South Asia: Narratives of Militarisation, Power and Justice (2017), and “Difficult Encounters with the WPS Agenda in South Asia” (2020), among other books, articles and chapters. 

Her research on gendered narratives of conflict and peacebuilding in Northeast India and Kashmir has been especially influential, and she has developed important frameworks for peace audits and empirical research on peace processes in South Asia. More recently, her work has focused on forced displacement, including internally displaced persons and refugees in the region.

Areas of expertise: gender, conflicts, peace, militarization, South Asia, human rights, identity struggles, democracy, refugees.