Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed

Prof. Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed was born in Lahore on 24 February 1947. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Stockholm University and served as a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University from 1987 to 2010. Currently, he holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stockholm University.

Dr. Ahmed is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore, where he served as Senior Research Professor between 2007 and 2010. Between 2013 and 2019, he taught winter semesters at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS, 2013-2015) and Government College University Lahore (2015-2019).

He has authored several books focusing on South Asian politics, examining regional and international relations. One of his notable works, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Account, published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, received the Best Non-Fiction Book Award at both the Karachi Literature Festival and the Lahore Literary Festival in 2013. The Indian edition was released by Rupa Books in 2011, with subsequent Urdu (2015), Hindi (2018), and Gurmukhi Punjabi editions also published.

His book Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History, published by Penguin New Delhi in 2020, was awarded the Best English Non-Fiction Book at the Valley of Words Festival, Dehradun, in 2021.

His latest book, Pre-Partition Punjab’s Contribution to India Cinema, published by Aakar Books, Delhi, in 2022, has been well received in both India and Pakistan.

Dr. Ahmed has extensively contributed to peer-reviewed journals and edited books. His research interests span political Islam, ethnicity and nationalism, human, minority and group rights, partition studies, and the Punjabi contribution to cinema. He is also a columnist for several Pakistani newspapers.

He is Editor-in-Chief of the “Liberal Arts & Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ)” and serves on the editorial advisory boards of “Asian Ethnicity”, “Journal of Punjab Studies”, “IPRI Journal, Islamabad”, and “PIPS Research Journal of Conflict and Peace Studies, Islamabad”.

Currently, Dr. Ahmed is working on a new book titled 1947 Partition Controversies: India, Punjab, Bengal.