Sameer Lalwani

Sameer Lalwani is a senior fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also a research affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program and a contributing editor to War on the Rocks.

His research interests include military technology competition, deterrence dynamics, alliances politics, and Indo-Pacific security. His work has been published in scholarly journals including International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, Asia Policy, Survival, and The Washington Quarterly. His policy analysis has also been published in numerous media outlets including Foreign Affairs and War on the Rocks.

From 2022-2025, he was a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace where he led work sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense on the China-India battlespace and supporting U.S.-India defense technology cooperation, including INDUS-X. He has provided expert testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and regularly provides expert analysis for the U.S. government.

Previously, he has been the director of the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center, a term member with the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the RAND Corporation. He is an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He has also previously taught at George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.