Hassan Abbas

Hassan Abbas is a Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) and a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center, in the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program. His research interests are Pakistan’s nuclear program, including and the A.Q. Khan controversy; religious extremism in South and Central Asia; and “Islam and the West.”

He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has an LL.M. in International Law from Nottingham University, UK, where he was a Britannia Chevening Scholar (1999). He also remained a visiting fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School (2002–2003) and later continued at the Program on Negotiation at HLS as a visiting scholar (2003–2004).

He is a former Pakistani government official who served in the administrations of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1995–1996) and PresidentPervez Musharraf (1999– 2000). His latest book, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America’s War on Terror (M.E. Sharpe) 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: “Sovereignty Belongs to Allah”: Constitutionalism and Human Rights in the Islamic States. He runs Watandost, which is a blog on Pakistanrelated affairs.