Peter deSouza is Co-director of the Lokniti programme and is currently coordinating the State of Democracy in South Asia 9SDSA) project. He is working on two components of the SDSA project: the Case Studies and the Dialogues.

Peter deSouza taught in the Political Science Department at Goa University for 16 years. He was a member of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committees on Political Philosophy and Political Sociology and was a member to the University Grants Commission’s expert panel in political science from 1997 to 2000. Professor deSouza was awarded the British Council Visitorship to the U.K. where he made presentations at LSE, SOAS, Warwick and Sussex University in 1992. In March 2000 he was a Visiting Professor at Birbeck College, London University, and in May 2001 he was a Visiting scholar at the Taubman Centre, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a member of the Editorial Committee for Indian Council for Social Science Research Survey on trends in Political Science and on the of Indian Journal of Social Science Review. His research interests has engaged with what can be termed as puzzles of Indian democracy, from the direction of political theory. He has published on issues as varied as minorities in India, multiculturalism and electoral politics among others. In recent years he has been examining issues of decentralized democracy in India and has published several articles on Panchayati Raj. His interests also include the State politics of Goa. He has just completed a study for the World Bank on ‘Dalits, Discrimination and the Struggles for Equal Citizenship’. Currently on leave at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.