Devika Makkat is Programme Associate - Operations at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi. At CSDR, Devika handles the day to day operations, events, projects in the Europe vertical and is a contributor to CSDR’s DIPTEL newsletter, which provides subscribers with analysis on India’s domestic and diplomatic undertakings—both regional and international. She was part of the 2023 cohort of the EU-India Young Leaders Exchange run by the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), Brussels. She holds a Bachelor’s in International Studies from FLAME University, Pune with a minor in Public Policy. She also holds a PG Diploma in Interdisciplinary Research from FLAME University. Her research interests include Indian foreign policy with a focus on India-EU relations and strategic-political developments within Europe and its outreach to the Indo-Pacific.

At CSDR, she is part of multiple projects in various capacities. She is on the organizing team of the Chao Track, a Track II between India and Pakistan. She has worked on the CSDR report Power and Purpose: Indian Foreign Policy 2023 and India, China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: Bilateral Relations, Geopolitical Trends, and Future Trajectory. She was previously on the management team of the Indo-Pacific Circle (IPC) project, a network of scholars and thought-leaders based in the Indo-Pacific region.

Previously she worked under Dr Rudra Chaudhuri on his project, Living on the Line of Control: Mapping Lives, Violence, and Development in India and Pakistan, a British Academy funded project that investigates the effect of cross-border violence, along the India-Pakistan LoC, on border populations. She has previously worked at the Delhi Policy Group, New Delhi and the Chennai Centre for China Studies, Chennai.