Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Mr. Farooq has undertaken both undergraduate and postgraduate training at the University of Warwick.  
He has extensive experience on issues around land, water and ecologies – particularly in Pakistan and Malawi. With a focus on everyday concerns and their interaction with different legal form, Farooq’s foundational concern is on coloniality and anti-colonial thought and praxis. It has led him to work closely with numerous communities in the Siraiki Waseeb, with adivasi (indigenous) fisher communities along the river Indus, with farming communities in Punjab, and land occupation struggles in Malawi. This includes formal legal interventions (such as litigation or representation within IFI compliance processes), innovative peoples law-doing in the form of the Lok Sath (People’s Tribunals), and towards developing practices of commoning. Farooq’s recent engagements have focused on Pakistan’s energy landscape and struggles against extractivism.
 
This experience is allied to a central preoccupation with the pedagogical method built across two decades of teaching at universities in Malawi, Pakistan, and England, aiming towards providing innovative courses that draw on the everydayness of law and law-doing, with a contextual approach to law. With an interest in property relations, anthropology, legal theory, ecologies and their perception, and international law, Asad’s research aims towards producing a wide range of outputs that exhibit an underlying concern to broaden the ways of speaking of worlds - from community-collaborative writings, archival websites, and varied artistic forms.