about
A Washington, DC-based Pakistani writer and researcher shaped by SAIS, Lahore, and field institution-building.
01
I completed an MA in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS after moving through political theory, human rights, development, and sustainability. That range gave me one durable question: how institutions decide whose lives become visible, protected, and worth planning around.
At SAIS and through Daadras, that question moved into technology and innovation policy: export controls, cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, AI governance, and program design. Before Washington, I grew up between Pakistani institutions that made education feel both fragile and necessary, shaping the way I read power through law, class, colonial inheritance, organizational incentives, and the lived consequences of institutional failure.
02
MA in International Relations, Technology and Innovation Policy. Public Service Fellow Scholar. Independent researcher at SNF Agora Institute on AI governance and democratic accountability. Thesis on how corporate actors co-securitize AI in U.S.-China export control architecture.
BS in Political Science, Philosophy, and Sociology. Magna Cum Laude. PEEF Merit-cum-Need Scholar. Led arts programming and worked across history, teaching, activism, and student institutions.
Fanon, Said, Bourdieu, Foucault, Freire, Ibn Khaldun, and Islamic philosophy. The common thread is how colonial inheritance, epistemic power, and class interact with legal and technical systems — which is also the lens applied to AI governance, compute policy, and institutional failure.
03
The coursework moves from political theory and sociology into applied methods, regional security, AI policy, and systems analysis.
Realms of Knowledge
Theory and society form the base; methods, security, and AI systems rise.
Forman Christian College
The undergraduate base starts with economics, sociology, philosophy, Pakistan government, international relations, comparative politics, and constitutional law.
Forman Christian College
The middle arc adds philosophy of religion, contemporary political theory, public opinion, sociology of gender, sociological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and politics of the Middle East.
Forman + SAIS
Research methodology, statistical methods, statistics for data analysis, R for professional research, field research methods, monitoring and evaluation, and policy consulting turn argument into evidence.
Johns Hopkins SAIS
SAIS sharpens the regional and legal frame through world order, cyberpolicy, international human rights law, humanitarian politics, Asia in Washington, geostrategy, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Johns Hopkins SAIS
The current layer ties AI governance, climate and energy policy, economics, media systems, systems analysis, AI Policy Clinic work, and Artificial Intelligence for Leaders into a single public-interest technology frame.
04
The best conversations are about public-interest infrastructure, institutional failure, and how to make difficult problems easier to explain.
mumerzafer@gmail.com