ATUL KOHLI is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. His principal research interests are in the area of political economy of developing countries. He is the author of India Under Modi: Changing State and Society (with Kanta Murali), forthcoming 2025, Cambridge University Press; Greed and Guns: Imperial Origins of the Developing World (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the U.S. Shaped the Global Periphery (2020); Poverty amid Plenty in the New India (2012) (a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2012 on Asia and the Pacific); State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (2004) (winner of the Charles Levine Award (2005) of the International Political Science Association); Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (1991); and The State and Poverty in India (1987). He has also edited or coedited ten volumes (most recently, Business and Politics in India, 2019; and States in the Developing World, 2017) and published some sixty articles. Through much of his scholarship he has emphasized the role of sovereign and effective states in the promotion of inclusive development.
He served as the chief-editor of the journal World Politics during 2006-13 and was the Vice President of the American Political Science Association During 2009-10. He has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.
He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
