Research areas

Mona Kanwal Sheikh has for several years conducted research on Islamist movements, with a particular focus on the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Sheikh also works on variations in Islamist ideology and the dynamics behind transnational jihad, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in South Asia and the Middle East.

Theoretically, Sheikh has contributed to the development of the sociotheological approach to the study of religious violence and to the conceptualization of religion within securitization theory. Based on her interest in the legitimization of, and mobilization for, violence, she has developed worldview analysis as a contribution to understanding and containing international conflicts with particular “escalation potential.”

Current research

Mona Kanwal Sheikh’s current research focuses on worldview conflicts and how they challenge approaches to conflict resolution and conceptions of peace within the disciplines of International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Theoretical contribution

Through her research, Sheikh has contributed to the theoretical debate on religious violence and to conceptual understandings of religion and secularism in IR. She has also contributed to the development of new conflict typologies that challenge peace and conflict research through her concepts of "bundled conflict constellations" and worldview conflicts. More broadly, she has contributed to the development of a more inclusive analytical framework that incorporates non-Western perspectives. Part of her work speaks to a critical expansion of securitization theory so that it can also be applied beyond the West and Western conceptual frameworks, including in the study of Islamist movements. More recently, she has also developed the sociotheological approach to the study of religious violence with the aim of bridging theological and sociological perspectives.

Visiting scholar

Sheikh has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University (2025), the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2024), the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2008–09, 2013–14), the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley (2014, 2024), and has also been affiliated during her research career with the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2008), University of Notre Dame.

Awards

Sheikh has received two elite research awards (2007, 2012) for her work on the Pakistani Taliban. Her book Guardians of God – Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (Oxford University Press, 2016) received an honourable mention from the International Studies Association’s Religion and International Studies Section in 2018. In 2017 and 2024, she was also nominated for the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s Elite Research Prize, and in 2012 she was nominated for the Royal Danish Academy’s silver medal for young researchers.

In 2018, she was awarded an ERC grant to lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers investigating the dynamics behind the transnationalization of jihad across different conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, contributing to the development of new understandings of conflict resolution in relation to transnational conflicts.