Apekshya Prasai
Biography
Apekshya Prasai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May 2024. She was previously a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University. She has received several awards for her research examining the gendered processes of civil wars including the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award, the United States Institute of Peace Dissertation Award and the American Political Science Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Apekshya worked as a researcher in Nepal Peacebuilding Initiative. She holds a B.A. in Government and Legal Studies from Bowdoin College. She will join the Department of Political Science at Boston University as an Assistant Professor in July 2025.
Research
Apekshya’s research focuses on gender, conflict and social transformation in the global south, with a focus on South Asia. Grounded in extensive fieldwork, her research combines ethnographic approaches with interviews and archival research to interrogate the relationship between civil wars and transformation of social, especially gender, norms. Her book project examines the gendered ways in which insurgents organize violence (i.e., their "Gender Strategies") and explains why some rebels conform to patriarchal norms while others radically subvert them. Presenting a novel theory of militant female activism, her work highlights the critical but neglected role women play in shaping the gender strategies rebels adopt. Her book and other related projects draw on extensive data collected through ethnographic fieldwork among former Maoist rebels in Nepal and archival research in the Netherlands and across several digital archives. Combining semi-structured interviews, oral histories and rare primary documents in Nepali, Hindi and English, her research sheds lights on the social, especially, gendered processes of civil wars.