Research Interests
Currently working on identity, representation, sovereignty, governance and digital politics.
Background
Åshild Kolås is a social anthropologist and Research Professor at PRIO. She has carried out fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities in India and China, and has written on Tibet, Nepal, Inner Mongolia and Northeast India with a focus on governance and governmentality, identity politics, discourse and representation. Among her latest books are Women, Peace and Security in Myanmar: Between Feminism and Ethnopolitics (Routledge, 2019) and Sovereignty Revisited: The Basque Case (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Pedro Ibarra Güell). She is also the author of Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition. A Place Called Shangrila (Routledge, 2008) and On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2005; 2015, with Monika P. Thowsen). She was the head of PRIOs Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Program from 2005 to 2011. From 2006 to 2018, she coordinated an institutional cooperation between PRIO and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi. She currently leads the project e-Topia: China, India and Biometric Borders, funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN). She serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of International Development and Vice President of the Interdisciplinary Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), and is also a member of the editorial board of the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EBHR) and Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.