Farzana Shaikh is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Born in Karachi, she was largely educated in Pakistan. She has a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and is a former Research Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Dr Shaikh is a specialist in, and has published widely on, Pakistan and South Asian Islam. She has held university lectureships in the UK, the US and Europe, and most recently was a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is also a respected foreign policy expert on Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is the author of Community and Consensus in Islam (1989, 2012) and Making Sense of Pakistan (2009), which was published to critical acclaim. Her project at IAS-Paris explores the politics of Sufism in Pakistan.