Feyaad Allie

Feyaad Allie is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research explores key questions related to democracy, identity, inter-group relations, and religious conflict.

Feyaad's dissertation project examines the causes and consequences of the sustained exclusion of marginalized groups, focusing on Indian Muslims — one of the largest marginalized groups in the world's largest democracy. In the dissertation's main theoretical and empirical chapters, Feyaad argues that contrary to conventional wisdom that power begets power, the political gains for marginalized groups can create the conditions for their political demise, a process he calls the representation trap. When a marginalized group comes to power without institutional protections such as quotas or reservations, it can divide the marginalized group and unite the dominant group. Feyaad tests this argument using causal inference methods and qualitative approaches through electoral data, a large-scale voter survey, and elite and voter interviews conducted during fieldwork in India. 

In other chapters of the dissertation, Feyaad provides a comprehensive story of the origins of the political exclusion of Indian Muslims, how they can break out of this exclusion, and what barriers, in addition to the representation trap, still hinder their progress. In other ongoing research, he focuses on contentious majority-minority relations and the intersection of technology and politics. Feyaad's research is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics. 

Feyaad is a graduate fellow with the Immigration Policy Lab and affiliated with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. He is also a Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Doctoral Fellow and an APSA Minority Fellow. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Stanford King Center for Global Development, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and the Stanford Center for South Asia, among others.

Prior to graduate school, Feyaad worked on an international development project in Nairobi, Kenya. He is a first-generation college student and received his B.A. summa cum laude in Government from Dartmouth College.