Sumitha Narayanan Kutty is an Adjunct Research Associate with the South Asia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research focuses on India’s foreign and security policies across the Indo-Pacific region with special interest in the Middle East. She has extensive field-work experience including in Iran, Israel, UAE, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the strategic island states of Maldives, Mauritius and Seychelles. Sumitha has contributed to journals such as The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy and the media including BloombergTV, CNBC, Channel News Asia, Al Jazeera, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, HT Mint, Business Standard, The National Interest, The Diplomat, Lawfare, The Wire, LobeLog and Al-Monitor. She is co-editor (with Rajesh Basrur) of India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Sumitha previously worked at the Atlantic Council of the United States, Albright Stonebridge Group and the World Resources Institute in Washington DC and was a research scholar at The Takshashila Institution, India. She was a broadcast journalist in India with a leading English news channel where she assisted in the coverage of the 2008 Mumbai Attacks, Indian parliamentary and state elections, and tracked key political and security developments across South Asia. She holds multiple degrees in journalism from India and a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
