About

sangeeta.mahapatra@protonmail.com
sangeeta.mahapatra@giga-hamburg.de

Dr. Sangeeta Mahapatra

I am currently a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, researching on digital politics; digital authoritarianism; disinformation; internet governance; and cyber resilience focusing on South and Southeast Asia.

I was trained in Political Science and International Relations (BA, MA, and PhD), learnt on the job Economics (as the editor of a business magazine in India), and love reading Political Philosophy and Sociology. My passion for these subjects as well as my training and field experience have taught me an important lesson about social science research: reality is often messy and multi-faceted. As such, to comprehend the richness and depth of a topic, I adopt an inter-disciplinary perspective ( often combining Political Science/I.R. with Media Studies) and use a mixed-method approach (field/digital ethnographic study, experimental study, critical discourse analysis) to research.

I have taught M.A.-level courses on Political Science and International Relations at the Department of Political Science, Presidency University, India, and the Department of Political Science, Diamond Harbour Women’s University, India. I have taught advanced grade courses on Political Communications at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications, NSHM Knowledge Campus, India.

I have also worked as the Executive Editor of a pan-India magazine, Business Economics, leading a team of journalists across India working on socio-economic and political issues.

I have been a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA; a part of the Global South Network of PhD scholars of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland; a part of Japan-South Asia Youth Forum (I.R. researcher) sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a GIGA India Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany.

Research Work

Digital Surveillance

  • Principal Investigator (PI) of a research project on digital surveillance and understanding its chilling effect on journalists in India. A connected research examines the links between digital surveillance, its different forms, and its impact on civil liberties.

Disinformation and Digital Repression

  • Co-PI of two research projects on the use of anti-fake news laws, rules, and regulations by governments in South and Southeast Asia to control the flow of information and censor critical civil society actors. The projects aim to come out with a database that tracks regional patterns and trends of the weaponization of anti-fake news laws against civic actors and come out with academic and policy outcomes to improve disinformation regulation to prevent its abuse and protect and promote digital and democratic rights of civic actors.
  • PI of a research that adopts an ecosystem perspective on mapping actors, processes, enablers, and outcomes of disinformation and counter-disinformation strategies in India.

Platform Governance

  • By creating a typology of different types of state influence on platforms, I examine how governments in South and Southeast Asia seek to regulate and/or control Big Tech and emergent tech companies on political content moderation.

Social Media Election and Political Messaging

  • Adopting a multi-platform perspective and differential messaging strategies, I examine how major political parties in India use social media and messaging services for political outreach and election messaging. I trace the evolution of their tactics and startegies from the 2014 national elections to the 2024 national elections.

Cyber Resilience

Using an International Relations and Strategic Studies perspective, I examine how state governments can build cyber resilience, specifically what I call “soft cyber resilience” against info-ops by external state and non-state actors.

Previous Work

Political Violence and Terrorism

My current research areas are informed by and flow from my past research works (2005-14) on identity politics, propaganda, and political violence (Hindu-Muslim riots; Israel-Palestinian conflict) and my doctoral dissertation on a comparative study of “Terrorism (origin, growth, and decline of terrorist groups) and Counter-Terrorism Strategies of India, Israel, and the United States of America”.

My past and current research help in creating a comparative framework to study how digital opportunities, platforms, and affordances have qualitatively carried forward conventional understandings of democratic participation, political communications, and political violence.

Recent publications

Conference Papers

  • “Comparative Study of Radicalized Societies and Terrorism: The Cases of India, Israel, and the United States of America”, Sangeeta Mahapatra, German Political Science Association (DVPW) Challenges for Comparative Politics Conference, ‘Comparative Politics and Area Specialization: Making the Tensions Productive’ Panel, October 2021.
  • “Digital Public Activism and the Redefinition of Citizenship: The Movement Against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of India”, Sangeeta Mahapatra and Kiran Garimella, Weizenbaum Conference 2021,  DOI: https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.cp/3.23
  • “Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites”, [co-authored] Yash Vekaria, Vibhor Agarwal, Pushkal Agarwal, Shounak Set, Nishanth Sastry, Nicolas Kourtellis, and Sakthi Mutthiah Balan, The International AAAI Conference on Web and social media 2021, Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.03656.pdf 
  • “Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media” [co-authored] Yash Vekaria, Vibhor Agarwal, Pushkal Agarwal, Sakthi Mutthiah Balan, Nishanth Sastry and Nicolas Kourtellis, WebSci Conference 2021. Preprint:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04442
  • “From Subalterns to Elites: Agitational Populism Through Social Media and the Reconceptualization of Power in India”, Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Edinburg, April 2020.
  • “Relevance of Rallies in a Digitalized Democracy: The case of India”, Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Edinburg, April 2020.
  • “Political Polarization of First-time Voters: The Role of Disinformation in Strengthening Bias of Indian Youth in the 2019 General Election”, Comparative Approaches to Disinformation, Workshop, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, October, 2019.
  • “Platformization of Political Communication and Public Opinion Formation in India: A Comparative Study of the ‘Chowkidar’ Campaigns of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress as an Election Plank”, 5th Conference of the International Journal of Press/Politics, Loughborough University, UK, September, 2019.
  • “Digital Extremism and the Politics of Polarization in India: Linking Online Speech to Offline Violence”, International Conference on Character Assassination: Challenges and Responses, Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP), George Mason University, Virginia, USA, March, 2019.

Policy papers, journal articles, book chapters, and monograph

  • “The digital party: political organisation and online democracy” (2022). Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14662043.2022.2088144
  • “COVID-19 intensifies Digital Repression in South and Southeast Asia” (co-authored with Janjira Sombatpoonsiri) in Issues at the Frontlines of Technology and Politics, edited by Steven Feldstein, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 19 October 2021. https://tinyurl.com/btt75ncf
  • “Digital Surveillance and the Threat to Civil Liberties in India”, GIGA Focus Asia, GIGA, Hamburg, No.3/2021. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/24697659-digital-surveillance-threat-civil-liberties-india/
  • “Twitter’s Modi Operandi: Lessons from India on the Challenges Social Media Faces in Reconciling National Law, Human Rights Law, and Terms of Service”, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Martin Fertmann, and Matthias Kettemann, Verfassung, February 24, 2021, DOI:  https://dx.doi.org/10.17176/20210224-154115-0
  • “Political Communication and Mobilisation: The Hindi Media in India”. (2019).  Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 57 (4), 508-510.
  • “Polarisation and Politicisation: The Social Media Strategies of Indian Political Parties”, Sangeeta Mahapatra and Johannes Plagemann of GIGA], GIGA Focus Asia, GIGA, Hamburg, 2019. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/11575625-polarisation-politicisation-social-media-strategies-indian-political-parties/
  • “India Online: How social media will impact the 2019 Indian General Election”, LSE South Asia Centre, London School of Economics, 2019. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/01/11/long-read-india-online-how-social-media-will-impact-the-2019-indian-general-election/ (Among LSE South Asia Centre’s Five most Long Read articles from 2015-2020).
  • “India Online: How social media will impact the 2019 Indian General Election” (republished), The Round Table, The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, London, 2019.
  • “India and Japan Boost Relations with High-Tech Focus”, The Diplomat, 2018.
  • “Global Economic Crisis: Capitalism in a Fix or a Flux”, Jadavpur Journal of International Relations, Sage Publications, 2009-10.
  • “All the King’s Men: The Thai Coup”, Jadavpur Journal of International Relations, Sage Publications, 2005-06.
  • Energy Security and Sustainability: Challenges and Prospects. Non-Traditional Security: Problems and Prospects in Dr. Madhuparna Gupta (Ed.), Burdwan: Avenel Press, 2017.
  • Economic Globalization: Understanding the Process beyond the Polemics, Globalization in India in Prof. Swapan Kumar Pramanick and Dr. Ramanuj Ganguly (Eds.), New Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd., 2009.
  • Human Rights in Pakistan: A Heuristic of Hope and Despair, Democratic Process, Foreign Policy and Human Rights in South Asia in Dr. Joseph Benjamin (Ed.), New Delhi: Gyan Books, 2009.

Invited paper presentations

  • “Redefining Democratic Citizenship in Digital Surveillance State”, PIR Seminar Series, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, March 24, 2021.
  •  “Digital Democracy: Polarization in Media and Politics”, Monthly Lecture Series, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, India, December 23, 2020.
  • “Disinformation and Online Radicalization: Lessons from the Global South”, International Webinar, IQAC-ICSSR, Dum Dum Motijheel Rabindra Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata, India, July 07, 2020.
  • “Opportunities and Risks of Digitalization in Democracies in the Global South”, STUBE-Studienbegleitprogramm für Studierende aus Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerik, Berlin, June 01, 2019.
  • “Countering Misinformation on Social Media during Elections”, Roundtable on ‘Artificial Intelligence & Democracy in India’, Microsoft Research, Tandem Research, and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bangalore, April 2, 2019.
  • “Social Media and Democracy: Election Messaging, Misinformation, and Platform Regulations”, Round Table of Facebook’s Social Science One, Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, and The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 22, 2019.
  •  “2019 General Election: The Social Media Strategies of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress”, SOAS University of London, London, January 08, 2019.
  • “Populism, Propaganda, and Polarisation: The Social Media Strategies of the BJP and the INC”, King’s College London, London, January 08, 2019.

Media Contributions

  • Interview: School Surveillance in India prompts data protection concerns, DW News, December 22, 2022.
  • Panelist: Silencing Dissidents: Are Changing Technologies and Politics Making it Harder to be Dissident, BBC World, August 18, 2021.
  • Interview: India: Smothering critique amidst the second COVID wave, Al Jazeera, May 01, 2021.
  • Interview: Donald Trump is finally visiting India, but why now? Experts tell us, HuffPost (India)S, February 21, 2020.
  • Interview: Will Bihar elections’ results be decided at rallies or the social media, BBC News (Hindi), November 6, 2020.
  • Against hatred on the internet, Welt-Sichten, February 2, 2020.
  • Interview: The Pegasus Files, Open Magazine, November 8, 2019.
  • Interview: A Country of Trolls, Open Magazine, October 11, 2019.
  • Interview: Cyber Warriors’ Sway Indian Election, Agence France-Presse, May 16, 2019.
  • Interview: The Dark Side of the Boon: Disinformation and Democracy, Open Magazine, April 19, 2019.
  • Interview: What’s at stake in India’s elections, BBC World, March 19, 2019.
  • Interview: Wahlkamph in Indien, Welt-Sichten, March 26, 2019.
  • Interview: India: Nationalism Right on Time, Open Magazine, March 15, 2019.
  • Interview: Using WhatsApp to Fuel Fake News Ahead of Elections, Time Magazine, January 25, 2019.
  • Interview: How WhatsApp is changing Indian Politics, Open Magazine, December 18, 2019.