Farzana Shaikh

Associate Fellow, Asia Programme, the Royal Institute of International Affairs

Farzana Shaikh is Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. She was born and brought up in Karachi, Pakistan, where she also received much of her education. After completing an MA at the University of Karachi, she left Pakistan to pursue a doctoral programme at Columbia University in New York, where she was awarded a PhD in Political Science. She has been a Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge and lectured at universities in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. She is a frequent commentator on current affairs in Pakistan for the media in Britain and abroad and has written extensively on the history and politics of Muslim South Asia.

She is the author of Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim representation in colonial India, 1860-1947. Her book Making Sense of Pakistan was published in 2009.