Muhammad Imran Mehsud is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in South Asian transboundary hydropolitics. He is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Hazara University Mansehra, Pakistan. As a fellow at the Mittal Institute in spring 2024, he investigated the effectiveness of the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 in settling contemporary transboundary water issues between India and Pakistan, given the significant demographic, climatic, and political changes these two nuclear rivals have undergone.
Imran holds a PhD and an MPhil in International Relations from Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan. His doctoral thesis examines the Indus Waters Treaty in the broader context of Pakistan’s quest for water security, while his MPhil thesis explores hydropolitics in South Asia with particular emphasis on India-Pakistan water disputes. During his PhD studies, he was awarded the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan’s research fellowship to conduct research at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Drawing from his own unique cultural and political experience of growing up in Waziristan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during a period of war between his tribesmen and Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Imran has authored a novel. The central theme of his unpublished literary work is childhood indoctrination and the arduous process of unlearning one’s deeply ingrained early lessons.
