Dr Mahvish Ahmad

Mahvish Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics. Before joining LSE, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cambridge. Earlier, Mahvish was a journalist covering military and insurgent violence in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, and co-founded the bilingual Urdu/English magazine Tanqeed with Madiha Tahir.

Key expertise: Violence, State, Militarism, Policing, Empire, War, Decolonial Theory

Mahvish's first project, Sovereign Destruction, studies what states demolish. We know states order social life for the purposes of government; she foregrounds the dismantling of alternative worlds that this ordering entails. She is currently completing a book on state violence in Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan, and will expand her inquiries to study global militarism next year, with a graduate-level seminar on legalised violence. She is also co-convening Archives of the Disappeared, a research initiative investigating the archiving and documentation of communities destroyed in acts of mass violence (with Mezna Qato, Yael Navaro, and Chana Morgenstern).

Mahvish's second project, Thought Under Siege, centres the thought of grassroots movements in sites of violence. Movements produce analyses, critiques, and alternatives to violent states, for example in underground pamphlets. This project will bring attention to non-canonical movement thought to expand and decolonise social theory. As part of Thought Under Siege, she is initiating a reading group focused on movement texts. She is also co-hosting Revolutionary Papers, a workshop that will investigate 20th century periodicals from the Global South as sites of Left, anti-imperial, and anti-colonial thought(with Chana Morgenstern and Koni Benson). Finally, she is working with Ahmed Saleem at the South Asia Resource and Research Centre in Islamabad; they maintain an archive of Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements.

Mahvish is part of the research cluster.

Mahvish teaches on the MSc Human Rights and Politics programme convening courses on Lawful Violence and Contemporary Politics of Human Rights.