She has a PhD in Advanced International Politics from Tsukuba University, Japan where she lived for five years on the prestigious Japanese Education Ministry Fellowship (MEXT) that she received in 2011. Tsukuba University is one of the top 10 universities of Japan and also figures in the top 250 universities globally.  She is also a recipient of the Okita Memorial Scholarship in 2010 from ICCR (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) and has published original research under those auspices. Her academic and research interests focus on Democracy, Civil Society, Women's Empowerment, Participatory Democracy and Constructivist International Relations Theory. She has presented academic papers at several International Conferences and Seminars both in India and abroad and has published extensively in both theoretical and empirical aspects of her work. Her publications include technical data analysis on civil society organizations in India and theoretical-analytical work on issues within the purview of democracy studies, civil society movement and research methodology. Her forthcoming work explores on the role of Ethics in contemporary academica. She has been the Principal Investigator for the JSPS (Japan Society for Promoting Science) and Tsukuba University co-funded international project spearheading a comprehensive review of the Civil Society Sector in India in 2014 Presently she is teaching at the Department of Security and Strategy Studies, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. She is a trained Kathak artiste and an HRD Ministry scholar on Kathak and Performing Arts and is frequently invited to grace events and deliver keynote addresses in that capacity as well. Swasti is proficient in English, Hindi, Urdu and Japanese. In her free time she loves listening to music and writing English prose and Urdu poetry. She can be reached at swastiraojnu@gmail.com, swastirao@yahoo.com