Farah Adeed

Areas of Interest: State-building, Religion and politics, Historical institutionalism, Educational governance, South and Southeast Asia

Farah Adeed is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Boston University, a fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA), and a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Science.

He studies state-building and religious authority in Muslim-majority countries, with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. His dissertation project asks: Under what conditions do religious education providers accept state oversight? In Pakistan and Indonesia, Islamic schools have long operated as parallel sites of moral and political formation, shaping how ordinary people understand law, obligation, and who has the right to govern. Yet the two states have had strikingly different experiences trying to bring those institutions under state oversight. He is interested in what that divergence reveals about the limits of how political scientists think about state power and about what it means to govern a society in which the state was not the only, or even the primary, architect of political order.

Prior to joining BU, he obtained an M.A. in Political Science and an Advanced Certificate in Comparative and Global Politics from San Diego State University, and a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from the University of the Punjab, Lahore.