Fellows Breakfast with Milan Vaishnav
February 2nd, 2026 7:30AM -9:00AM
*This event is only open to our 2025-2026 Fellows
The World Affairs Council Fellows Program offers a unique professional development opportunity to a small group of greater Seattle's business and community leaders. The Fellows convene monthly for breakfast discussions with carefully selected high-caliber international experts who offer unparalleled insight into current global issues, in addition to meeting throughout the year for additional Council events and dedicated networking opportunities.
About our Speaker
Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program and the host of the Grand Tamasha podcast at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He also conducts research on the Indian diaspora.
He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press and HarperCollins India, 2017), which was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation book prize for the best non-fiction book on contemporary India published in 2017. He is also co-editor (with Devesh Kapur) of Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India (Oxford University Press, 2018) and (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press, 2017). His work has been published in scholarly journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Asian Survey, Governance, India Review, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Studies in Indian Politics. He is a regular contributor to several Indian publications.
Previously, he worked at the Center for Global Development, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an adjunct professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (currently on leave) and has previously taught at Columbia and George Washington Universities. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.