Dr Asad Zaidi
I am a researcher of empire, war and the struggles for modern world order. Currently I am writing on decolonization and political theory, as well as on Pakistani encounters in the Afghan-Soviet War. I work as a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster where this year I am teaching courses including Introduction to International Relations (UG), Critical Approaches to World Politics (UG) and Theories of International Security (MA). I am an active member of the Colonial / Postcolonial / De-colonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association. Previously I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
My recently completed PHD was undertaken in International Relations at the LSE and was ESRC funded. My doctoral thesis examined the encounters between Pakistani nationalists, Islamists and socialists, Anglo-American empire and West Asian social forces, and illuminated the ways in which these world historic encounters constrained superpowers and reshaped world politics, from the Baghdad Pact to the end of the Afghan-Soviet War. Rather than thinking of these relationships within dominant Eurocentric and state-centric security studies perspectives, I reimagine these relations through their historical, imperial and transnational dimensions. In so doing I investigated the dynamics between Pakistani state and social forces and their global relations within Cold War and decolonisation politics.
Much of this work deals with the strategic and socio-political features of anti-imperial histories, including transnational interconnections between South Asia and the Middle East, anti-colonial and Muslim politics and Cold War geopolitics. More broadly, my work seeks to interrogate postcolonial nationalism and Euro-centrism in international political thought, opening up the connections between war, empire, hierarchy, resistance and anti-colonial thought as components of global modernity. I have wider interests in imperialism and anti-imperialism, the politics of the Middle East and South Asia, Islamic political and international thought, as well as international relations theory, global historical sociology and postcolonial theory.
My scholarship uses these inter-disciplinary approaches between history and theory to rethink the connections between contemporary ruptures in the prevailing international system, with preceding politics of empire, hierarchy and conflict. In this way it seeks to understand modern power politics in relation to the histories of the non-European world, to excavate the relational and global dimensions of International Relations.
Previously I taught in the LSE IR department, coordinated the LSE research workshop on statecraft and security, worked as deputy editor at the Millennium Journal of International Studies, inaugurated the LSE IR roundtable series and spearheaded the Pakistan Critical Studies Reading Group at SOAS. I have presented my research at conferences worldwide including at ISA, BISA and EWIS. Alongside academia, I have previously worked in documentary filmmaking, freelance journalism, universities, charities and research.
My interdisciplinary scholarship rethinks relations between warfare, anti-imperialism, Global South societies and global encounters in world politics. I write on topics including anti-imperial thought and practice, decolonization, imperial wars, the Cold War, globalisation, political violence, conflict and mobilisation in Cold War Pakistan and Afghanistan, the international politics of West Asia, socialist internationalism the Global South, as well as on Eurocentrism in the social sciences, race and racism, the neglected importance of war in political and social theory and on recalibrating modern histories of empire through relational histories of the Global South and theories of historical change.