About

Sunil Amrith is a professor of history at Yale University, affiliated with the Yale School of the Environment. His research focuses on socio-economic conditions, health, and environmental issues in Asia, with particular attention to the impacts of climate phenomena such as the monsoon. His work includes comparative studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and explores themes related to health, sovereignty, migration, and environmental change in the Asian context. Amrith has contributed to understanding the historical and contemporary challenges faced by Asian societies, emphasizing the interconnectedness of environmental and social factors.

Research topics

• Geography
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Development economics
• Socioeconomics
• Meteorology
• Economics
• Archaeology
• Economic growth
• Law
• History
• Business
• Economic history

Selected publications

• The formation and transformation of informal settlements in Yangon, Myanmar: A historical analysis

  Geoforum · 2025-11-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Yangon’s informal settlements have long been shaped by historical residues of various governing systems and wider political economy since colonial times. However, research on these evolving and highly dynamic urban spaces remains limited. Most existing studies focus on contemporary socio-economic conditions, migration, and the daily lives of the residents, with little attention to their historical transformations. In contrast, this study argues that the contemporary socio-economic dynamics of Yangon’s informal settlements cannot be fully understood without situating them within the historical transformation of different governance systems and broader agrarian political economy of Myanmar. This study therefore primarily seeks to answer (1) historically, how have Myanmar’s agrarian crises interacted with urban governance since colonial times? (2) how have these interactions shaped the distribution and evolution of informal settlements over time? and (3) what are the impacts of these dynamics on present-day socio-economic conditions? The findings reveal that the spatialization of Yangon’s informal settlements and their corresponding socio-economic conditions are intrinsically linked to historical urban governance and broader political-economic changes at the national level, beginning from the colonial period. It argues that their emergence and transformation are shaped by a historically contingent interplay of governance practices, land use policies, and socio-political dynamics. From the city’s geography and topography to its political and economic policies, Yangon’s informal settlements reflect the interplay of socio-economic forces and historical and contemporary urban governance regimes. In essence, Yangon’s informal settlements are spatially and temporally contingent, exhibiting significant socio-economic differences due to their evolving spatial–temporal nature.

  PublisherDOI

• A Turn to the Indian Ocean

  Wits University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Spatial and temporal impacts on socio-economic conditions in the Yangon slums

  Habitat International · 2023 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Economic growth
  • Socioeconomics
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 11. Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023-04-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Himalaya and Monsoon Asia

  2023-03-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through monsoons in Asia, and offers a history of the anthropocenic changes in the Himalayan highlands and Bengal since the 1800s. Manifested as a series of intertwined natural and human events, climate change in this chapter is understood as what the authors call clime change, which refers to actual meteorological, ecological, geomorphological, livelihood, and social transformations. It is physical, political, and affective as shown in the colonial history and the postcolonial environmental state of South Asia. As an alternative way to understand climate change, the clime perspective, as the authors argue, allows us to see place, specific places in all their particularity, as embodiments of climate as well as agents of climate change in both natural and anthropogenic senses. Based on the authors’ archival and field research, this chapter builds a case of a modern terrestrial nexus of the Himalaya, Bengal, and the Indian Ocean as a set of monsoon climes that have undergone human-induced changes from the colonial era to the present. It invites readers to rethink the climatic meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2022-08-02

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This book critically examines the range of policies and programmes that attempt to manage economic activity that contributes to political violence. Beginning with an overview of over a dozen policies aimed at transforming these activities into economic relationships which support peace, not war, the book then offers a sustained critique of the reasons for limited success in this policy field. The inability of the range of international actors involved in this policy area, the Development-Security Industry (DSI), to bring about more peaceful political-economic relationships is shown to be a result of liberal biases, resulting conceptual lenses and operational tendencies within this industry. A detailed case study of responses to organised crime in Kosovo offers an in-depth exploration of these problems, but also highlights opportunities for policy innovation. This book offers a new framework for understanding both the problem of economic activity that accompanies and sometimes facilitates violence and programmes aimed at managing these forms of economic activity. Summaries of key arguments and frameworks, found within each chapter, provide accessible templates for both students and aid practitioners seeking to understand war economies and policy reactions in a range of other contexts. It also offers insight into how to alter and improve policy responses in other cases. As such, the book is accessible to a range of readers, including students interested in peace, conflict and international development as well as policy makers and practitioners seeking new ways of understanding war economies and improving responses to them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• COVID Roundtable

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2021-11-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Kavita Sivaramakrishnan: We convened this roundtable conversation in February 2021 as an informal dialogue among leading scholars, thinking about the current COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of historical convergences. This pandemic reveals persistent, historical asymmetries and inequities rooted in specific histories of mobility and immobility—migration and displacement, capitalism and globalization, colonialism and decolonization. The roundtable emerged from an editorial the CSSAAME editorial board wrote in May 2020 that reflected on the effects of COVID-19. That editorial noted that the effects of COVID were evident in “the intersecting crises of state violence and economic collapse—along with the multiplex failures of governing institutions” that were evident in all the regions that are addressed by CSSAAME's intellectual project.1 The pandemic and its multiple, complex manifestations brought “into relief a moment of history characterized by both global interconnection and deep ambivalence about it” and COVID's flattening, universal epidemiology masked and reinforced “systems of exploitation and brutalization that structure our world.”2The conversation that we have captured here reflects the nuanced and thought-provoking ideas and scholarship of the participants—Banu Subramaniam, Julie Livingston, Omar Dewachi, and Sunil Amrith—who all study the body and biopolitics. Their approaches range across global histories of medicine and science, anthropology, and feminist studies of science, environmental and transnational histories of migration, and studies of war and humanitarianism, but they share a broad interest in the shifting power of the state and in consequences of capitalism. Their discussion and lively debate affirms, questions, and speaks to new directions for research and analysis that emerge from this moment racked by deep moral dilemmas and historical reckoning. At a time when the body is at the heart of debates about controlling, containing, and reframing its viral exposures and epidemiological vulnerability, we see that debates about controlling access to therapeutics and immunity, sustaining rapid economic growth, and investing in productive populations are now more open than ever before.To begin, we posed several broad questions to initiate a discussion among our participants, and to suggest a common perspective, viewing COVID as having specific stages and developments. Imagining it as having a “lifecourse” links complex biological and social phenomena, but also reveals how virality is politically perceived and linked to social and historical conditions.Our questions were: How might we consider the link between epidemic and endemic crises, especially drawing from experiences of metabolic risks, embodied pain, toxicity, violence, and stigma that have long and persistent afterlives?Epidemics have also long been associated with moments of dramatic, transformative rupture and of social discontinuities. Yet they can also be viewed as generating impulses toward reconstitution and reorientation, as in the case of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the moral, political, and public health debates it generated and reframed. How might we reconsider this binary between notions of rupture and of reconstitution today in the case of COVID? In other words, how do shifts in notions of a continuous historical timeline also create new possibilities for the future, or of collective forms of futurity themselves? What moral reworkings and realignments may emerge from this pandemic?Finally, there has been a deepening of global biopolitics, international and national surveillance mechanisms, and health-security-focused laws that have implications for mobility, migration, privacy, and safety as legal, moral, and biological justifications have often been conflated. How do we understand these shifts now, as well as past and present responses and resistance in the face of such deepening interventions?In addition to our participants, we warmly thank our observers, Devon Cheney Golaszewski and Valentina Parisi, who joined us and engaged closely, refining, clarifying, and articulating crucial threads of this roundtable. Their support and input were indispensable.• • •Banu Subramaniam: Pandemics reveal layers of racialized bodies and dichotomies of biology/culture. I come to this discussion as a biologist and see the unfolding global life of the virus SARS CoV-2 as yet another lesson about our impoverished accounts of the natural world. Coming from feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), I see yet another moment of a reinscription of an abstract binary of nature and culture, rather than understanding the unfolding pandemic as an instantiation of racialized nature-cultures. The pandemic reveals rich and layered sedimentations of race: racialized bodies, racial Others—virus and human alike. From the vantage point of feminist STS, the virus is not “evil,” “Chinese,” or “foreign.” It is a single strand of RNA. Planet Earth in 2020 proved fertile ground because of the world created by some human actions, including the increased colonization of the wild, opening new pathways of viruses into human worlds; globalization hubs that transmit goods and people everywhere; and an impoverished health-care system that renders the virus lethal to some. The pandemic is a racialized nature-culture object par excellence.In particular, xenophobia and Orientalist discourses have dominated our narratives of the virus and its origins in China. Through the language of “yellow perils” and “yellow alerts” in keeping with Orientalist rhetoric, the virus has been rendered “sneaky,” “cunning,” as “an assailant,” “shifty like a chameleon,” “an invisible enemy that is pure evil,” and called “the Chinese “the “the and “the In the there an international of the in a in of this generated as a It violence, and of a and The and some were with some are of the virus as enemy has of to and Coming from a long history of an the system has been a structure with of as as as for and a of health that is for our of and have also on these and of This is on a of that renders the virus as the enemy and as In in of the system and rather than the virus more complex is I like we have a from the bodies by the the HIV/AIDS pandemic to an of of also to about how are not but transformative by how a from to been as an by people to nature and In are and of are like viruses and across for have long that such have the of life on including and across biological populations do not present the in the and and populations in the have been The biological populations in other of the world have not the from and in the have been to in than in populations in the and national rather than or to be the as a of are as and and the of populations in abstract language of and This is the of a racialized yet another health we see to health between language we have the pandemic is are other to this The of have been as for The of language of and other of the pandemic an impoverished body have This with are but are not be on the but on and that of We the the of viruses and on a of life that can and or can in the I to the questions that were a point that Kavita posed for us and to by the link between epidemic and endemic crisis in the virus the of endemic that is the of and that we as the of from the of and to heart and We that these of and economic This pandemic crisis us an of as in a that be That as well as it on how we how effects across a of in both and I that we to and with we are The epidemic is in What I in that the epidemic the epidemic but it on a new life as it to the The of the epidemic the that some of that epidemic have but it new life its to the this is for complex epidemiological and biological I to is that the of an of we also see of of we do not they are we can see this the have COVID with of to heart of with other forms of and This reveals the of our health are not the forms of and that are for by people who are with It also the between the economic and the our current are on the in to and we this We have a long to come and us the the and health are of the not they have been rendered that in the and this This is and it is a to who have on the as we in the a state that the that it not to to the pandemic at in the to some people a of as to We have to to the of that this it is not we are to have a with the of the some people also of We to understand economic we see how are productive of this like they have been for that have come we we can see that in a is the of the we at we can see that the of the are health to be more on the of these including how human and the in We created the of for this pandemic our the of some of the the of and are long histories of as in the in the when people were at the point of a or to in that they were are other are complex and they and when the it to into to and We that with the associated with are a in the This the people who but it is also in that to when our this also reflects for because of the that are to be with an toward This is to us as well as to the to have more for In we effects and into the also an a for the that can to the by in the We are in a we at of we see of the I not I see a to create a for these are with and and leading to that are for to health to and this system and not of this system by an to rhetoric, of it as to of racialized with the in are to to because we are with the racial of but public health for the system is on the of rupture and It is to I that the in the might have been by we see with the that have a public health can some but that with the system that in the We have that in the a for this The of a it a that We see all of new possibilities of the as we do of the or in the the we also see the of of on a and new forms of for the of the pandemic in and and we also see the of also do not see a but are yet by a of the This to public yet the and and the to of the for to and this I to more of a and perspective, from and research on medicine and public health in in the the past I have been the of in the the human of health and state and the of we of these there has been a of to how the pandemic has reinforced forms of surveillance and I in this the of and for the body has more and more this perspective, of the I see in the is a of a of in with the of health-care the of resistance in in and What is is the that COVID-19 has resistance in these to in the of war and in of and of This is because are with and there is and of and the has there of health across national and hubs as with health in to or or for common and and to in a health-care COVID has that of At the there is linked to resistance with the COVID I these I the that the are from from from or with This from to the other and on the of the health-care is the between and has a health-care system that on rather than In the case of COVID also to in In are the and this is see more of from a on a and of this is by the crises and the environmental that have to of are populations more than to the of the that COVID social in like and to the that the has been on for a the virus these were in COVID has been by and people have been and between and in of and are and there has been a of in the and the pandemic to the of In are as for the state to health and a for In this a has emerged virus the of the to the are because the state that support from these do we from I the in is to be a of an health that were of the of the What been the and is the and of these I not of are and I also not to or into the that has in and discourses about the pandemic with all of we is and as the as a in the there to be a the of the body and for and the the life of I by how this pandemic and At in a it has a in the of among the in the who have viewed as to such risks, and the of there are a for such has been an of the in the also among the of across the global this to I have been with and it What it to is the or the of environmental Kavita and Julie have What has been is a of with and the of public is here is the an by on in the that this pandemic has our that the of the or the as Julie that for a have been to it may be more than Julie we have the of to the to be a of health that at the heart of How do we for the nature of the responses we have the of transformative rupture that Kavita posed to as a of and the for is not to a past but to the in the time in that see and in between and The the of to and for the a of in the when the of new from and to the who were or to because the on they were The consequences of that were not but for a the of migration, toward migration, and the of were I we see in toward and of this In the the in the of as as in the for the toward there is and and I a of some of the dilemmas at at in of pandemic in it has in more than other I the of the in the of has been have been the but it has been In of were at a moment in there were In the of are not of the the that there are to a of in these to in for are opening can to for a of to not these like other the state increased its surveillance of this has been a debate about it has also to a from in of how have been created new of and also by the of the The that are in and as rather an This is not about it has often been in the rather about between and has this point and of in both the state and This is Omar it I we are at the between is the is in This is not about but historical that have like or all moments of economic at the moment of the of but they are also by historical such as histories of colonization and forms of medicine and health surveillance with the in It is that there is a current in global health health-care with an on universal health as to This has to about are and are in to the questions have histories and a for state in the the At the to create a health system by a for but the the epidemic of as a to for a more universal health system and a for state moments of such as the state with in and the war of the the the and international we the of this This the both and were We see of and of the of violence and war is another to all of its and now they are we a of this health with war and international to the of the as to in other in the global is a to to the on This of has been on in the can to a and a of including when as we in the is more on the ground than we I these of are to and The and for thinking about how are and how history in the of not in the of and What Omar is I to about this between the and of biopolitics. 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It is not the of but is also not I also about narratives are the are and In people in of the to the of there are people of the the the This is also in the In there about how we the and as Julie this a between and In the to support the in like this not such responses the In on a more of the than I that a in for other of is not than of and more about the health of the is a because it not at in the the is not linked to the of is in this The that the between or is a to and and to like of especially as people are of this not this to people who to there were and linked global is also in not like that across the people have that some bodies the it to there are who not the This of has a long history in studies of medicine in for the of some people can this In for in that COVID is a but like is to these are and are by we have there is we to and this is a that is to is also a of the keeping of a the is to shifts in and might to social but they are not in for and health the I how the language of our for and of us who in have in some created a of that the come the It is also to see in like and the of is often to life and to the range of people are to I do to a and that this I in the and the in in that people into the bodies on the and I the I this and I to at we this are about the global we can the be for the global to in are called to the What the What is the The In the we have been are to the I that to is at the of the In the case of the we have and other to be the pandemic to they have long to for it is that and who to for not be with and do more the from the It is that this moment not a to more into What and How might we this moment to rather than We have the at state our has been I new to racial and language of but in a in the on racial and and all the can do This of has created a that has some dialogue to be are rooted in and experiences of and it is that international are not into these from the of who is from the I with that the has this crisis to do they to do an on and of and an of are the of What can we do as We have to our I also see this as a in the are to history and of racial and this is in and This to some the of across the in there is a of debates and ideas at as in how see the past these are and to the of in the the the that they are but historical experiences and are more to there have been crises with COVID-19 has been a for to do they and has the of the and This is also a of access to and on a are social we can be to as as some other like epidemiology that are in the we of public to This also the that some see this as an for new I that this the of the and the to other as and the of the is an to how this the it not to be a of or of a as its a to public possibilities may be to relief for it on the people have that have a I also see another more in the I are with the has its on other the is a of is the of people it as a and other people and the is that we the on the of to the of and create the of are on and our is to create that also to our and the to as of a this is a moment in people are to have to and we create or that people have and in to the of as who are as a as to “the all that is on I have with is the of What are people on the ground are and how to of we in the of and there new that are in this moment to in the of epidemiological I thinking of of virality in of across the on is a of surveillance or We see other social of that are about the and This also shifts how we and of who has and how they In like how at who is in public health as an a with has We have such a of is by the and not is a of of and in of as How is this from in historical It is that this is with the we the it like and as we a it is this It is because in other we have other at and when it to We are these like and common in of not there are pandemic generated at the especially in of the invisible or consequences that were there other of this pandemic that and are more to and among in like This is and to other of that especially as health and are more not This the of as the pandemic on from to the also links into more access to for who have the and to and this and can now of that they not have access to about and and can on and but also new of This also by the and is in because all of the is such as the of in I the of is also How be in In for there is the of and people are for the Chinese as there are about the also its and its as a of We are to see of about there a that people between and I have been a medicine but The that these are bodies that are to and in the In this is but and to and like to to who have and other be the to in a life of I this is in the global and in the with and racialized that populations are or COVID in the I we do see the and of medicine I have a of to the that COVID is a of the global the global has been by the global health to these a of to that the global health has on the by specific in the global especially of this has been by a to the of and natural on are the and its This has not been in but it has a of in like it with in the in the or the for and people of in the who are in than other is a persistent as we on to and COVID to be a pandemic that is from the past and an We can also see this in the of the pandemic has been across a of health and It into relief the the that it We we can or we can see the and of public health but I not we can for the some do well for a long and is that we in the we all of these about populations more there were of in might of the in the in the not we can is that it is a as is of the is that is not a some of the that we a about immunity, with a and can at the of the is than the do for the or or are for the be on the that be the of this to how people to and understand are questions here to This the on also thinking about other forms of is of and but that is not a in other forms of like about have to about It is to about how this to the and the We COVID to be a single bodies with a of may by and but these are of a Yet we see us that this is not the is some of to to to to it I not it I the to medicine in to the of the a is now in the bodies of people in the global it may be that some of the that have been in the to to health that are or a may not be people can this is not a of

  PublisherDOI

• Medicine and the monsoon

  The Lancet · 2021-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Life and Possible Death of the Great Asian Monsoon

  American Scientist · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Islam’s Eastern Frontiers

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nicholas J. Long

  36 shared

• Sigrid Rausing

  King's College Hospital

  36 shared

• Minh Chau

  Vietnam National University, Hanoi

  36 shared

• William Wyse

  University of Cambridge

  36 shared

• Susan Bayly

  36 shared

• Joel Robbins

  36 shared

• Магнус Марсден

  University of Sussex

  36 shared

• J. W. Cook

  University College London

  36 shared