Prof. Samir Kumar DAS is presently the Vice-Chancellor of the University of North Bengal. A Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata (now on lien) he is a member and an Honorary Senior Researcher of the Calcutta Research Group (CRG). Besides being the Coordinator of the UGC-DRS Programme on Democratic Governance: Comparative Perspectives, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow (2005) of the Social Science Research Council (South Asia Program) based in New York. He specializes in and writes on ethnicity, security, migration, rights, justice and democracy and lectured widely