May Debate I - 12th May 2009

Baroness Falkner of Margravine, Dr Farzana Shaikh, Sir Hilary Synnott KCMG

Baroness Falkner is a Liberal Democrat Peer in the House of Lords. She is Spokesman for the Ministry of Justice. The first Muslim peer for the Lib Dems, she speaks extensively on public policy issues relating to foreign affairs, counter-terrorism and civil liberties, Muslims in the West, multiculturalism and integration. In 2006, she was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where she concentrated on US Foreign Policy and Democracy in the Islamic world, building on her extensive personal experience of living and working in the Islamic world. She was appointed Chancellor of the University of Northampton in 2008 and serves as a board member on several non-profit organisations. She was born in Pakistan and naturalised as a UK citizen in 1983. She joined the Liberal Democrats in the mid 1980s and worked for the party in several posts till 1999. She was elevated to the House of Lords in 2004. Farzana Shaikh is an Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, where she directs the Pakistan Study Group. After receiving a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University she was elected to a Research Fellowship in Politics at Clare Hall Cambridge. Since then she has lectured at universities in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and has commented widely on Pakistan for the media in Britain and abroad. She is the author of Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim representation in colonial India, 1860-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and has written extensively on the history and politics of Muslim South Asia. Her new book, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst/Columbia University Press), is published in May 2009. Sir Hilary Synnott KCMG specializes in South Asian affairs and post-conflict issues at The International Institute for Strategic Studies. Before retiring from the British Diplomatic Service, Sir Hilary was the Coalition Provisional Authority's Regional Coordinator for South Iraq from July 2003 until January 2004, having responsibility for civilian affairs in Iraq’s four southern Provinces. He served for three years as British High Commissioner in Islamabad, until 2003, was Director for South and South-East Asian Affairs at the FCO in London from 1996-1998, and Deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi from 1993-1996. He has also served in Amman, Paris and Bonn. Before joining the British Diplomatic Service, he spent 11 years in the Royal Navy where he was a submariner. He is the author of ‘The Causes and Consequences of South Asia's Nuclear Tests’, published in 1999 and ‘Bad Days in Basra: My Turbulent Time as Britain's Man in Southern Iraq’, published in 2008. His most recent article ‘What is happening in Pakistan?’ was published in the January/February edition of Survival.

Click here to download this article (opens in a new window)

You can view comments on this article here

You must log in before you can make comments