Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist who works on Indian politics and crime, and the relation between the two. Trained at Boston University and at Oxford, she is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge; she is also currently a co-Inversitagor on an international study of democracy and political criminalisation in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (funded by the European and the British Research Councils). She has written historically and ethnographically on India‘s criminal tribes, borders, secrecy, publicity, corruption and the police, and has recently edited a book on Patronage as Politics in South Asia (CUP 2014).