Biography
Samik Kharel is an award-winning journalist and researcher from Nepal whose work explores the intersection of technology, democracy, digital rights, and political participation. Over the past decade, he has reported on political movements, human rights, migration, social transformations across South Asia for international publications including Al Jazeera, Tech Policy Press, The Green European Journal, The Diplomat, Balance, dpa, and The Record.
His reporting has focused on how digital technologies reshape democratic processes, particularly in contexts where institutional distrust, censorship, and youth disillusionment intersect. In 2025, he extensively documented Nepal’s unprecedented Gen-Z digital uprising, examining how decentralized online communities used platforms such as Discord, TikTok, encrypted messaging applications, and VPNs to organize mass protests that toppled the government and experimented with new forms of digitally mediated democratic participation. His reporting has also covered the COVID-19 pandemic, human rights abuses linked to the Qatar World Cup, and the involvement of Nepali mercenaries in the Russia–Ukraine war. In recognition of his investigative reporting on civil rights, he received the Fetisov Journalism Award in 2023.
Alongside journalism, Kharel works as a researcher on digital governance and artificial intelligence. He contributes to the Global Index on Responsible AI (GIRAI), assessing progress toward rights-based AI governance and accountability, and has collaborated with organizations including UNDP, IDRC, EngageMedia, the Internet Society, ICANN and regional digital-rights networks on projects related to internet governance, technology policy, and digital accountability. He has also contributed to the books Pandemic of Control: COVID-19 and the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism in the Asia-Pacific and Drones and Dreams.
Kharel holds a Master’s degree in Media, Arts and Cultures through the Erasmus Mundus programme of the European Union. He is currently busy doing the prestigious Humboldt Residency in Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, where this year’s residency focuses on democracy and political participation.
At the PTML Lab, Kharel aims to deepen his research on how digital platforms, algorithmic systems, and online media ecosystems reshape political participation and democratic legitimacy. Building on his firsthand reporting from digitally networked protest movements in South Asia, he seeks to investigate how leaderless movements emerge, coordinate, sustain collective action under conditions of censorship and platform governance and negotiate legitimacy in an era where democracy is increasingly mediated by algorithms, online communities and digital infrastructures. By combining journalism with interdisciplinary research, he hopes to contribute a Global South perspective to ongoing debates on technology, media, and the future of democratic participation.