Dr. Zahid Shahab

Dr. Zahid Shahab Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the National Defence College (NDC) of the United Arab Emirates. Before joining the NDC, Dr. Ahmed was a Senior Research Fellow (Senior Lecturer) at Deakin University, Australia. He has taught courses in security studies and international relations at Deakin University, Charles Sturt University and the University of New England in Australia, and the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Pakistan.

Dr. Ahmed has extensive research and teaching experience. He was a non-resident research fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy during 2017-2019 where his project focused on China’s soft power in Pakistan. During 2013-2016, he was an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Centre for International Peace and Stability, NUST. Dr. Ahmed’s work is cited and has received over 1,000 citations and he has been awarded competitive research grants, including from the Australian Research Council. To academia, he brings his rich grassroots level experience in peacebuilding and countering violent extremism as he has led projects with UNESCO, Hedayah, USAID and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung across Asia and East Africa.

Dr. Ahmed earned a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of New England (Australia) in 2012. His dissertation examined regionalism and regional security in South Asia. As part of his Ph.D. research, he was a visiting fellow at the Secretariat of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Nepal. He holds a Master’s degree in Peace Education from the United Nations mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica, and another Master’s in Sociology from the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan.

His research interests are foreign policy, security and strategy, contemporary international politics, geopolitics and geoeconomics in South Asia and the Middle East. Besides publishing numerous scholarly papers in prestigious journals, such as Third World Quarterly, Asian Studies Review, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Contemporary China, Contemporary South Asia, Global Policy, and Territory, Politics, Governance, he has co-edited books and special issues. He is the author of Regionalism and Regional Security in South Asia: The Role of SAARC (Routledge, 2013) and the lead author of Iran’s Soft Power in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).