Dr Sameen A. Mohsin Ali

• PhD in Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, 2018
• MSc in Comparative Politics (Research), London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010
• BSc (Hons) in Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences, 2008

Sameen joined IDD in 2021. She completed her PhD in Politics and International Studies from SOAS University of London in 2018. From 2018 to 2021, Sameen was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Sameen specialises in the bureaucratic politics of Pakistan. In her published work, she centres bureaucratic politics in understanding the distribution of public goods, the success or failure of donor-led reform packages, the ups and downs of party politics, and in citizens’ experience of state services such as immunization.

Sameen’s work has been published in World Development, Publius: A Journal of Federalism, The Lancet, Regional and Federal Studies, Public Administration and Development, Policy Studies, The Oral History Review, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, European Journal of Development Research, and the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration. She is co-editor of the textbook The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024). 

She is a member of the Education, Justice and Memory Network (EdJAM), an AHRC GCRF funded project (2020-2025), investigating the teaching and learning of violent pasts in several countries around the world, including Pakistan, the UK, Cambodia, Colombia, and Uganda.

Sameen is Co-Director of the Women in Public Service in Pakistan Oral History Archive Project, housed at the Gad and Birgit Rausing Library at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is a fellow at the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre (MHRC) and the Technology for People Initiative, both based at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

• Public Sector Reform (course convenor)
• International Development (course convenor)

Sameen currently works with the following doctoral candidates:

• Rodas Elias

She welcomes proposals investigating elite politics (especially bureaucratic politics), institutional design, and state capacity – particularly in the Pakistani and South Asian context. Sameen is also interested in supervising projects that explore the provision of state services – education, public health, and so on – as avenues for political contestation.

Research interests

• Bureaucratic politics and state capacity
• The politics of bureaucratic reform
• Donor programming and bureaucratic motivation
• Citizen-bureaucrat interactions
• Immunization and public health education
• Teaching and learning about violent pasts

Current Projects

Book Project

Sameen is currently working on a book project, Staffing the State: Bureaucratic Politics and Patronage in Pakistan’s Hybrid Regime. The book provides an explanation of the use of patronage based bureaucratic appointments to regulate politics, service delivery, and governance in Pakistan’s hybrid regime. The book aims to make significant new theoretical and empirical contributions, showing how the politicisation of bureaucratic appointment practices in Pakistan embeds hybridity into the permanent institutions of the state, preventing the country from breaking out of a cyclical pattern of military rule and failed democratic transitions.

Minoritisation, Community, and Attitudes toward Immunization

With Dr Rabia Malik (Essex), Sameen was co-investigator of a British Academy Small Grant studying responsiveness to public health messaging in Pakistan. This work aims to contribute to a key global health challenge of our time as immunization programming is repeatedly challenged in the UK, US, and elsewhere.

The Education, Justice, and Memory Network (EdJAM)

As a Learning, Evaluation, and Participation co-lead for EdJAM (an AHRC/GCRF Network Plus project, focused on teaching and learning about violent pasts across 13 countries – project website), Sameen is working with colleagues to evaluate the work of the network and the projects it commissioned around the world.

More information about Sameen’s research is available on her website.

• Consultant – Pakistan expert, COVID-19 and Federalism’s First Wave Response, Forum of Federations (August-October 2020)
• Consultant – Governance and the Pandemic Expert Survey, Working Paper Series for the Governance Programme at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London. May 2020.
• Reviewer - Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Bertelsmann Stiftung, December 2020-February 2021.
• Consultant - SAFE-App Project. Shirkat Gah and Democratic Commission for Human Development, with Dr Suleman Shahid and Dr Fareed Zaffar, 2020-2021.
• Consultant - Political Economy specialist, Scoping Study, DFID Pakistan Water and Natural Resources Governance Programme, July-August 2019.