Farzana Shaikh

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Farzana Shaikh is an Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, where she directs the Pakistan Study Group.  She is currently a Resident Fellow of the Institut des Etudes Avancées, Paris.

Born in Karachi, she was largely educated in Pakistan. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, New York and is a former Research Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Shaikh is a specialist on Pakistan and has written extensively on the history and politics of Muslim South Asia. She has held university lectureships in the UK, the US and Europe, and was most recently a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

She is the author of Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in colonial India (1989, 2012) and Making Sense of Pakistan, which was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. Her project at the IEA-Paris explores the politics of Sufism in Pakistan.  Shaikh is also a respected foreign policy on Pakistan and Afghanistan and in 2010 was invited to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on the UK’s Foreign Policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.