Contact information
Email: mmufti@uwaterloo.ca
Areas of specialization
- Democracy and Democratization
- Hybrid Regimes and Authoritarianism
- Party Politics
- South Asian Politics
- Politics of Pakistan
BA (Pakistan), MA (Johns Hopkins University, 2006), PhD (Johns Hopkins University, 2011)
My research focuses on the role of the military and political parties in the processes of recruitment and candidate-selection selection of the political elite in Pakistan as a way to understand the behavior of political leadership and regime dynamics. I use Pakistan as a case-study to address the dearth of analysis on how politics works in hybrid regimes. Based on this research, my book manuscript entitled Pathways to Power: Elite Recruitment and Regime Change in Pakistan is under contract at Palgrave Macmillan in its book series on the Politics of South Asia. An edited volume, Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy (Georgetown University Press, 2020), (co-edited with Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui and Dr. Sahar Shafqat) also emerged from this research agenda. It is a contemporary, and to date, the most comprehensive examination of Pakistan’s party system and its growing relevance as the country makes a transition to democracy.
Apart from academic research, I have considerable policy-relevant consultancy experience, having authored monographs on democratic development, political parties and religious extremism for The Asia Foundation, Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) and Department for International Development (DFID). I have also written over 25 articles for widely-read international newspapers, magazines and appeared on numerous podcasts. In keeping with my interest in undemocratic, hybrid regimes, I have also appeared on a 6-part series on The Dictator’s Playbook on PBS (released in 2018), How to be a Tyrant on Netflix (2021), To Kill a Dictator on Amazon Prime (2023), Secret Bases of Nazis (2024) and Nazis: Threads of Evil (2024).
Selected awards
- 2023-2026 Principal Investigator, Teaching Innovations Incubator, Adapting Student Led Individually Created Courses (SLICCs) to Encourage Self-directed Learning at University of Waterloo, 222,500$
- 2022-2023 Principal Investigator, LITE grant
- 2018-2020 Principal Investigator, UW/SSHRC Grant
- 2017 Excellence in Arts Teaching Award
Selected publications
- Mufti, Mariam, Niloufer Siddiqui and Sahar Shafqat (eds.) 2020. Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving Between Dictatorship and Democracy. Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press.
- Mufti, Mariam., & Ali, S. A. M. 2025. Political elite careers in Pakistan. Regional & Federal Studies, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2025.2471749
- Mufti, Mariam. 2024. “Pakistan in 2023: A Year of Desperate Survival.” Asian Survey 64(2): Forthcoming
- Mufti, Mariam. 2023. “Pakistan in 2022: A Year of Crisis and Instability.” Asian Survey 63(2): 213-224.
- Mufti, Mariam and Sameen A. Mohsin Ali. 2022. “Political Parties and Decentralization in Pakistan”, Publius: Journal of Federalism, 52(2): 201–224.
- Mufti, Mariam and Hassan Javid. 2022. “Electoral manipulation or astute electoral strategy? Explaining the results of Pakistan’s 2018 Election”, Asian Affairs: An American Review, 49(2): 65-87.
- Mufti, Mariam and Farida Jalalzai. 2021. “The Importance of Gender Quotas in Patriarchal and Clientelistic Polities: The Case of Pakistan”, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 42(2): 107-123.
- Mufti, Mariam and Andrei Zhirnov. 2019 “Electoral Constraints on Inter-Party Mobility of Candidates: The Case of Pakistan” Comparative Politics 51(4):519-554.
Courses taught
- Politics of South Asia
- 9/11 and the War on Terror
- Government and Politics of Asia
- Elections in Comparative Perspective
- Global South: Introduction to International Development
- Protest, Social Movements and Revolutions
- Comparative Politics: State and Nation
- Kings, Generals and Tyrants: Politics of Authoritarianism
- Research and Methods in Political Science