Dr. Shandana Khan Mohmand is a social scientist whose main area of research is inequality and inclusive politics. She leads the IDS Governance research cluster, and the IDS Pakistan Hub.
She is the author of Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (2019, Cambridge University Press), and a number of other journal articles and book chapters. She is also on the Editorial Board of the Modern South Asia Series of Oxford University Press (New York); an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS); and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).
As a social scientist, her research is focused on the relationship between political participation, inequality and accountability, especially in fragile and conflict affected contexts. Her research interests include democratisation, inclusive politics, local governance, social trust, informal institutions, and the political economy of public policy and service delivery. Her research is interdisciplinary and comparative, and she has contributed to both policy and social science research using varied methodological strategies to investigate these issues in South Asia, the Western Balkans and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Shandana is a lead researcher on a number of research projects, including the ESRC funded ‘Sustaining Power: Women’s Struggles Against Contemporary Backlash in South Asia’ (SuPWR); the ESRC funded Inequality and Governance in Unstable Democracies programme; the Gendered Contentions workstream of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Programme (A4EA); and the Covid Collective Research Platform. She has also designed and led on a number of professional training programmes to strengthen research communities in Africa, Latin America, and the Western Balkans, which include the Multi-Method Research Course (MMRC) offered annually in Kenya; the ELLA network in Africa and Latin America on comparative research; and a programme to strengthen research skills in Albanian universities.
Shandana teaches modules on Democracy and Public Policy, and on Research Design for both the MA and doctoral programmes. She is currently supervising the doctoral dissertation of Mireille Widmer that looks at the governance of security in urban Nepal.
