Rajkamal Singh

Research interests: Political Sociology; Social Movements; Inequality, Caste, and Class; State Repression and Protest Policing; Agrarian Politics; India.

Bio: Rajkamal Singh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Practicing Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was previously a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at New York University.

He is a comparative political sociologist who studies how social divisions, political institutions, and state repression shape social movement organizing, with a regional focus on India. His ongoing book project draws on the Indian farmers’ movement to examine when organizations rooted in constituencies shaped by historical inequality and conflict (caste, class, and ideology) collaborate to build resilient and effective social movements. His published research looks at how protester identity and protest characteristics affect police permission for public assembly, how social hierarchy shapes protest strategies, and how decentralized institutions incentivize interdependent mobilization among political elites.