Senior Researcher (member) at the South Asia Institute (SAI), Heidelberg University, and Director of Research at SADF (Coordinator: Democracy Research Program). He was educated at the SAI and Institute of Political Science (IPW) in Heidelberg. Additionally he is a visiting fellow at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST, Islamabad), affiliated researcher at the Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU, Durham University), and a former research fellow at IPW and Centre de Sciences Humaines (New Delhi, India). He is the co-author of ‘A Political and Economic Dictionary of South Asia’ (Routledge: London, 2006), co-editor of ‘Politics in South Asia. Culture, Rationality and Conceptual Flow’ (Springer: Heidelberg, 2015), ‘The Merits of Regionalisation. The Case of South Asia’ (Springer: Heidelberg, 2014), and ‘State and Foreign Policy in South Asia’ (Sanskriti, 2010), and Deputy Editor of the ‘Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics’ (HPSACP). Furthermore, he has worked as a consultant for the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Germany, and is member of the external experts group of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Task Force, Federal Foreign Office, Germany.