Tariq Basir

Tariq Basir is a political economist and 2026–2027 Visiting Faculty Fellow at The Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Kabul University and a Research Scholar with The Afghanistan Project at the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. This project is an effort to preserve the intellectual communities of Afghanistan by supporting fellowships for threatened and displaced scholars at Pittsburgh and partner higher education institutions worldwide.

Professor Basir’s primary research interests lie in political economics and formal theory with applications to revolutions, collective action problem, democratization processes and non-democratic politics. Substantively, he is interested in the study of democratization movements in the MENA region as well as the political economy of governance in Afghanistan. His work uses tools of economics and game theory, incorporating mathematics and formal modeling to explain political processes like democratization and regime change. The driving factor behind his research is to understand political processes in undemocratic regimes and identify the conditions needed to transition into a democracy.