Citizenship: Pakistan and Canada
I was born in Lahore, Pakistan, but it is not the only place I consider home. Throughout my childhood, I lived in Oman, Libya, Angola, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In 2024, I graduated from the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus with an Honors Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. Growing up in diverse places meant I became deeply familiar with political phenomena and theories before learning about their official and formal names in my undergraduate classes. From a young age, having witnessed the extreme disparity and inequality that exist around the world, I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to tipping the scales in favor of humanity, regardless of a person’s ethnicity, sexuality, gender, or race. From my undergraduate studies, I have come to believe that establishing global governance is a key path to achieving this goal. This is what I plan on studying in my Global Thought program, especially with the program’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity. I aim to explore how institutions of global governance can collaborate with people through a social contract (in the Rousseauian sense) to hold states accountable for ensuring a dignified, humane, and equal quality of life for all citizens. I plan to use my degree to work for international organizations whose entire ethos is working to combat global inequality, and I intend to develop the thesis I created during the MA program into a foundation for pursuing a PhD.