Anurug Chakma is a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. He was awarded the Australian Government Research Training Program (AGRTP) scholarship in 2018. His core area of research interest stems from his life-long conflict experience in the Chittagong Hill Tracts as a member of the Chakma indigenous community, and his decade-long refugee life in Tripura, India.

Anurug completed both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh), and obtained his second master’s in governance and Development from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) under the VLIR-UOS scholarship program. Prior to starting his doctoral studies at the ANU, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Dhaka. He has also worked as a researcher at the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST), and as a researcher and national consultant at the UNDP-CHTDF and University College London (UCL) over the last six years.

Anurug has published a number of peer-reviewed research articles on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh) peace process, donor-driven peacebuilding, grassroots peacebuilding, NGO peacebuilding, human rights of indigenous peoples, the refugee problem, and South Asia terrorism and security in journals such as the Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, the Journal of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Peace and Conflict Review, the Journal of Sociology, and Social Science Review. He also attended several international conferences in Australia, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand to present and disseminate findings of his various research projects.