Areas of Expertise
- Climate and water security
- India’s global relationships
- Indo-Pacific security and geopolitics
- Gender and foreign policy
Short Bio
Ambika Vishwanath, a senior associate fellow in DGAP’s India Center, is a principal research fellow at the La Trobe Centre for Global Security. She recently spent two years conducting field work across the Pacific to understand the region’s growing complex challenges and Pacific-led solutions. For over 20 years, she has worked with governments, international organizations, and civil society on areas of water, climate security, and foreign policy and gender to build a better understanding of an emerging new India.
Within the transboundary water, climate, and foreign policy space, Vishwanath has conducted and participated in field work across the basins of rivers including the Senegal, Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan, Rhine, Danube, Lower Mekong, Nile, Kagera, Brahmaputra, Indus, and several others within India. She has a proven track record in bridging the complexities and conflicting interests between transboundary water governance and climate on the one hand and foreign and security policy on the other. She was instrumental in creating Blue Peace, a water diplomacy initiative that has now become a self-sustaining network. Her research contributed to the establishment of a High Level Blue Peace Panel at the United Nations.
Vishwanath cofounded and led Kubernein Initiative, a research consultancy in India that conducted flagship research on Indian domestic and foreign policy. She is the Ombudsperson for the Global Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative and is a member of the Global Council of the Women in Water Diplomacy Network. She has written or contributed to over 50 policy and research reports; attended, spoken at, and convened over 60 international policy dialogues and conferences; and writes regularly for traditional and new media across the world.
Languages
English, Hindi, Tamil
[Last updated: September 2026]
