Development, Policy, Security: Lessons from the Real World

Karen James

Karen James is an international development and humanitarian leader with more than 23 years of experience managing multimillion-dollar portfolios in fragile and conflict-affected environments. A former USAID Foreign Service Officer, she has served in Afghanistan, Haiti, Guatemala, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Eastern Europe, leading disaster response efforts and development programs focused on democracy and governance, gender-based violence prevention, and access to independent media. Ms James also served as a USAID Development Advisor to the U.S. Central Command, where she helped integrate development priorities into regional security planning and coordinated civilian-military approaches to crisis response and stabilisation across the Middle East. Ms James holds a master’s degree in international policy and conflict resolution from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Sudeep Chakravarti

Sudeep Chakravarti is an author, independent researcher, an analyst of South Asian geopolitics and geo-economics, as well as a historian, a columnist, and a media consultant. Before joining Ahmedabad University in October 2024, he was the Founder-Director of the Center for South Asian Studies (C-SAS) at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), coordinator of the South Asian Studies Minor programme at ULAB, and the initiator of various thought platforms and literary activities. He also taught journalism, South Asian literature, conflict studies, and ethics. Sudeep is an Advisor to the General Management and Public Policy Area at the Goa Institute of Management.

He is the author of several non-fiction works encompassing history, culture, politics, ethnography, Indian and South Asian security issues, regional geopolitics and geo-economics, conflict and conflict resolution, the intersection of democracy and development, and the intersection of business and human rights. He writes extensively on these subjects in the media, and continues to participate in local and global forums to address these matters. He was earlier invited to the Club of Asia by Strategic Intelligence. He is an alum of the BMW Herbert Quandt Young Leaders' Forum. And he was for several years a Professional Member of the World Future Society.

Sudeep has nearly four decades of experience in media and worked with global and Indian organisations, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, where he began his career, and subsequently held leadership positions at Sunday magazine, India Today magazine, India Today Group, and HT Media, the publishers of Hindustan Times and Mint. His work covered economic policy, trade, business, markets, foreign policy, security, politics, governance, regional affairs, business and human rights, and history, among other aspects, covering an arc that began before the first Gulf War and carried through to a ringside view of India's economic liberalisation, and continues to the complex terrain of rapidly evolving policy and outcomes in this millennium. He also blueprinted two of India’s leading thought platforms, the India Today Conclave and the Hindustan Times Leadership Initiative.

As a media consultant, Sudeep has helped to blueprint and launch several publications, including Rolling Stone magazine’s India edition in 2008, where he was Editor-at-Large. He was also editor of the ‘Making of Modern India’ project for livehistoryindia.com over 2020-2021.

As one of India’s earliest media convergence and integrated newsroom specialists, Sudeep’s experience is multimedia across print (magazines and newspapers), digital, and television platforms. Besides his other editorial responibilities, he was also Editor of India Today Group Online and Executive Editor of India’s first digital newspaper, newspapertoday.com, launched by India Today Group. In his various media roles and functions, he worked across the domains of reporting, writing, editing, blueprinting, and planning and management.

He co-founded Coastal Impact with other scuba diving enthusiasts in Goa, India. A not-for-profit, Coastal Impact evangelises marine conservation to school and university students, conducts regular underwater clean-up of trash and ghost nets, and participates in research related to marine biodiversity and coral regeneration.