Hassan Abbas

A leading expert on South Asia and the terrorist organizations based in the Pakistan- Afghanistan region

Hassan Abbas is an accomplished scholar, media commentator and an author.

Dr. Hassan Abbas is a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, a Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) and an Associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU), University of Bradford, in the United Kingdom. He was recently  named the Quaid-i-Azam Chair by New York’s Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.  His research interests are Pakistan's nuclear program and the Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan controversy; religious extremism in South and Central Asia, and "Islam and the West."

Prior to his present academic endeavors, he served in staff positions in the administrations of President General Pervez Musharaf (1999-2000) and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1995-6) in Pakistan. He also served as a senior police officer in the North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan during 1997-8. In terms of his academic accomplishments, besides receiving a master’s in political science from a leading Pakistani University, he spent a year in U.K. as a Britannia Chevening Scholar (1998-99) and completed his LLM in international law and also remained on the editorial board of Human Rights Law Journal in the University of Nottingham.

He has been based in Boston Massachusetts since early 2001 and completed his MALD degree from the Fletcher School, Tufts University in 2002. After this, he spent a year at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School where he worked on his book “Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror," which has been on bestseller lists in India and Pakistan and widely reviewed internationally including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Hindu, Dawn, etc.

He has also appeared as an analyst on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and as a political commentator on VOA and BBC.

His forthcoming book is titled: "Letters to Young Muslims on Science, Sufis and Sovereignty." He also runs Watandost, a blog on Pakistan-related affairs.