Aqil Shah, who joined McDaniel in fall 2025 as a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, has been promoted to associate professor of Political Science.
He is also the college’s National Model United Nations advisor and oversees McDaniel’s National Security Fellows program, providing McDaniel students with robust knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intra-state political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.
His research focuses on civil-military relations, hybrid regimes, political violence, and security issues in South Asia, with recent work examining state coercion and mass protests in Bangladesh. Previously, Shah taught at Barnard College, Georgetown University, University of Oklahoma, Dartmouth College, and Princeton University.
He has served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has also held consulting appointments at the World Bank and United States Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy, Rights and Governance; and fellowships at the National Endowment for Democracy; Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; and the Harvard Society of Fellows. Shah has been an analyst and consultant on South Asia for Social Science Research Council, the International Crisis Group, and the Asia-Pacific Governance Program of the United Nations Development Program.
He is the author of “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan” and has contributed articles to journals including International Security, Foreign Affairs, and Journal of Democracy. His commentary and op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post and New York Times with his most recent article on the protests in Kashmir that have resulted in civilian deaths by security forces published by Time magazine (“The Other Side of Paradise: How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir,” Aug. 17, 2026).
A Rhodes Scholar, Shah earned a Master of Philosophy in International Development from the University of Oxford. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and History from the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan.
