Zoha Waseem

Zoha Waseem is a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie South Asia Program. She is also an assistant professor at the department of sociology, University of Warwick. She is a co-coordinator of the international platform, the Urban Violence Research Network and Associate Editor of Critical Studies on Security. She holds a PhD in security studies from King’s College London, UK.

Waseem conducts interdisciplinary research on policing, state violence, crime and politics, and counterinsurgency with a focus on Pakistan and South Asia. She is broadly interested in the intersections of law and violence, the politics of policing and insecurity, the pluralisation of security provision, militarisation, migration, and informality in the urban global South. She employs ethnographic and qualitative methods in her research, drawing conceptually upon postcolonial, critical, and southern perspectives upon security, policing, and criminal justice.

She is the author of the book Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2022) which ethnographically explores the development of police institutional culture in postcolonial contexts, with a focus on urban Pakistan. She is also co-editor of the volume, Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security, and Social Order (Bristol University Press, 2023). Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Policing and Society, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.