Dr Anurug Chakma is a Research Fellow in the Migration Hub of the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University (ANU). Before this academic position, he was a casual sessional academic in the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIR) at the ANU. He also taught several undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, for four years as a Lecturer and one year as an Assistant Professor. Apart from this, he worked as a researcher at the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST) and as a researcher and national consultant on different projects at the UNDP-CHTDF and University College London (UCL) over the last six years.

Dr Chakma has recently finished his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) on 20 December 2022 from the SPIR at the ANU. In his PhD dissertation, he used statistical modeling and computational methods on a text corpus to address the puzzle about why civil war peace agreements work in some democratic countries but not in other democratic countries. His PhD research interest stems from his life-long conflict experience in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) as a member of the Chakma indigenous community and his decade-long refugee life in Tripura, India. His core research interests span from terrorism, civil conflicts, and peace processes to cross-border migration and diaspora communities, Asia and global indigenous issues, and computational social science.

Dr Chakma has published peer-reviewed research articles on issues from peacebuilding and human rights of indigenous peoples to forced migration and South Asia terrorism and security. He has recently published an article, “Leadership Changes and Civil War Peace Agreements: Does Who Comes to Power Influence the Implementation?” in the International Peacekeeping. He has also presented the findings of his various research projects at several international conferences in Australia, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand.