Shalini Randeria

Shalini Randeria is a social anthropologist and sociologist with over 40 years of experience at leading institutions across Europe. She served as Rector and President of Central European University from 2021 to 2025 — the first woman, and the first person from the Global South, to hold the position. She currently holds an Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she is leading a new research programme on youth movements for re-democratisation in South and Southeast Asia, and is a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She previously served as Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and as founding Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She served as Senior Technical Advisor to UNFPA for its 2025 flagship publication on the State of World Population, and continues to explore the entanglements of demography with democratic politics. She is deputy chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences at Academia Europaea. Her research spans soft authoritarianism, democracy and demography, forced displacement, and the politics of (un)accountability, carried out in collaboration with historians, political scientists, and legal scholars across the Global South and Europe. She hosts the podcast series Democracy in Question, now in its 12th season with over 100 episodes, reaching broad audiences worldwide. Her current research focuses on attacks against reproductive rights and gender justice in soft authoritarian regimes, academic freedom as foundational to liberal democracy, and youth movements for re-democratisation. She was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Heidelberg, and Oxford, where she was among the first cohort of women Rhodes Scholars, and received her PhD and Habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. Shalini is a Salzburg Global Fellow.