Professor Peter Ronald deSouza

Professor Peter Ronald deSouza is the new Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Prior to this Professor deSouza was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He was Co-director of the Lokniti programme and was currently coordinator of the State of Democracy in South Asia (SDSA) project besides being the Chairman of the Goa Knowledge Commission. He is also working on two components of the SDSA project: the Case Studies and the Dialogues.

Professor deSouza taught in the Political Science Department at Goa University for 16 years. He was head of the Department from 1996 to 2002. He was a member of the International Political Science Association's Research Committees on Political Philosophy and Political Sociology and was a member to the University Grants Commission's expert panel in political science from 1997 to 2000. Professor deSouza was awarded the British Council Visitorship to the U.K. where he made presentations at LSE, SOAS, Warwick and Sussex University in 1992. In March 2000 he was a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London University, and in May 2001 he was a Visiting scholar at the Taubman Centre, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a member of the Editorial Committee for Indian Council for Social Science Research Survey on trends in Political Science and on the of Indian Journal of Social Science Review. He was part of the team that did a review of Social Science Research Capacity in South Asia for the Social Science Research Council, New York.

Professor deSouza has been a consultant to the World Bank on Rural Decentralization, to the Ford Foundation on Local Government in India, and to the International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International-IDEA) in preparing their handbook on Democracy Assessment. Professor deSouza has several books and research papers to his credit. In recent years he has been examining issues of decentralized democracy in India and has published several papers on Panchayati Raj. His interests also include politics in Goa. He has just completed a study for the World Bank on 'Dalits, Discrimination and the Struggle for Equal Citizenship'