Dr. Harrison Akins is a political scientist and award-winning author, based in Washington, DC. For 15 years, he has been researching, writing, and advising on South Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, security, and human rights from several positions within both academia and the U.S. government, including serving in the U.S. Department of State, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), and the Professional Staff of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

His research, relying on both quantitative and qualitative methods, has been published in several scholarly journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Oxford Middle East Review, and Journal for Muslim Minority Affairs. A frequent contributor to the media, his essays have been featured in the Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, BBC, Al Jazeera, USA Today, the Guardian, and the Tennessean, among other outlets. He is the author of Adversary and Ally: How China Shapes the Frontier Politics of India and Pakistan (Columbia University Press, 2026), The Terrorism Trap: How the War on Terror Escalates Violence in America’s Partner States (Columbia University Press, 2023), and Conquering the Maharajas: India’s Princely States and the End of Empire, 1930-50 (Manchester University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 British in India Book Prize “for excellence in writing about the history of the British in South Asia.” His current book project, Fatal Outrage: A Modern History of Rumors, Disinformation, and Violence in South Asia, examines the ways in which rumors and disinformation act as catalysts for different types of violence.

Dr. Akins received his PhD in political science, with concentrations in international relations and public policy, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also earned a graduate certificate in global security studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, an MSc in political theory from the London School of Economics, an MA in philosophy & classics (the Great Books Program) from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and a BA in history and music performance (viola) from American University in Washington, DC.