I am Associate Professor in International Development at the University of Birmingham, in the International Development Department (IDD). I was previously Assistant Professor Lecturer in the department, and prior to that Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS) at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. I completed my PhD in Politics and International Studies from SOAS University of London in 2018. My dissertation investigated relationships of patronage amongst politicians and bureaucrats in Pakistan as a means of targeting service delivery. I completed an MSc in Comparative Politics (Research) at the London School of Economics in 2010.

I am an expert in the politics of development, governance, and reform, with particular reference to Pakistan. I work in the fields of comparative politics, development studies, and political economy, with a specialisation in the bureaucratic politics of Pakistan. My research posits that bureaucratic politics deserves greater consideration than it has thus far received in understanding political and administrative (in)stability in hybrid regimes such as Pakistan. As such, I contend that dynamics amongst bureaucrats, politicians, and other actors and institutions are crucial to understanding variations in state capacity and service delivery. Using this lens, I study the dynamics of bureaucratic reform, the implementation of donor programs and projects, and the impact of hybrid regime dynamics and institutional design (such as federal design) on bureaucratic performance and party politics.

My book project, Staffing the State: Bureaucratic Politics in Pakistan’s Hybrid Regime, makes significant new theoretical and empirical contributions by showing how the politicisation of bureaucratic appointment practices in Pakistan embeds hybridity into the permanent institutions of the state, preventing the country from breaking out of a cyclical pattern of military rule and failed democratic transitions.

My other projects include work on immunization and public health in Pakistan and on the use of technology by women human rights defenders. I am co-Director of the Women in Public Service in Pakistan Oral History Archive, and was a co-investigator for the Education, Justice, and Memory (EdJAM) Network and an FCDO Sub National Governance program funded project on financial analytics and budgeting with the Punjab Finance Department.

In addition, I have ongoing projects looking at citizens’ and especially minority communities’, experience of state services such as immunization (with Dr Rabia Malik) and at bureaucratic engagement with donor programming. I have recently also been engaged in researching the agents, processes, and consequences of disinformation in Nepal and Pakistan.

My work has been published in World Development, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Regional and Federal Studies, Policy Studies, Public Administration and Development, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, The Oral History Review, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, the European Journal of Development Research, and the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration.