Happymon Jacob is a strategic affairs scholar and public intellectual. He is the Founder and Director of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research (CSDR), and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. Before this, he spent seventeen years on the faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he built a reputation as a scholar unafraid to go where the questions lead, including onto both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir. He is the editor of India’s World, India’s first dedicated foreign policy magazine, and a regular columnist for Hindustan Times. His books—Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India-Pakistan Escalation Dynamics (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Line of Control: Traveling with the Indian and Pakistani Armies (Penguin Viking, 2018)—are among the most rigorously researched and closely read works on the India-Pakistan military relationship. For over sixteen years, Prof. Jacob has facilitated Track-2 dialogues between India and Pakistan, working quietly at the intersection of diplomacy and ideas at a time when official channels have largely fallen silent. His life’s work rests on a single, unfashionable premise: that closing the gap between policy and scholarship is among the most consequential things a scholar can do.