About
Dr. Siegfried O. Wolf
is a distinguished scholar and researcher. He specializes in South Asian politics—particularly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. His work also addresses broader regional dynamics. He earned his academic credentials at Heidelberg University. There, he studied at both the Institute Institute of Political Science (IPW) and the South Asia Institute (SAI). For his Master’s thesis, he examined Hindu nationalism as a social movement. Later, his doctoral research focused on collective identity in India. In this, he used Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva concept as a key case study.
Dr. Wolf has held numerous prestigious positions throughout his career. He served as an assistant professor (“wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”) at the SAI and spent over 13 years as Director of Research at the South Asia Democratic Forum (SADF), a Brussels-based think tank.
Currently, he is a member of the SAI, a visiting professor at Naresuan University (Thailand), and a visiting scholar at De La Salle University in Manila (Philippines). Additionally, he has been a research fellow at the IPW, the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi (India), a visiting fellow at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad (Pakistan), and an affiliated researcher at the Pakistan Security Research Unit at Durham University (UK). As SADF’s Research Director, he was a partner in the Horizon 2020 Global India program, a PhD training network funded by the European Union.
Work
Bridging academia and policy, Dr. Wolf has consulted for NATO-sponsored strategic research on Afghanistan-Pakistan issues and was a member of the external expert group of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Task Force at the German Federal Foreign Office. He has also advised Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
His research focuses on critical themes such as terrorism, civil-military relations, economic corridors (including the Belt and Road Initiative), and democracy in South Asia. Dr. Wolf is a frequent commentator in international media, offering incisive analysis on South Asian affairs. His work challenges establishment narratives, shedding light on state-sponsored terrorism, ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical strategies in the region.
A prolific author and editor, Dr. Wolf has contributed to several notable publications, including A Political and Economic Dictionary of South Asia (Routledge, 2006), Politics in South Asia: Culture, Rationality, and Conceptual Flow (Springer, 2015), and Terrorism Revisited: Islamism, Political Violence, and State-Sponsorship (Springer, 2017). He previously served as Deputy Editor of the Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics and regularly publishes in outlets like E-International Relations or IndraStra, where he analyses contemporary issues such as the Taliban’s role in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s political landscape, and regional security challenges. His latest book is The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Concept, Context, Assessment (Springer, 2019).