Our history

Its founder, Ahsan Chaudhary, began wrestling with these questions nearly two decades ago while studying and teaching law in Pakistan. Specifically, he was unsettled by how conventional political science treated the state as a monolithic actor with interests rather than as a composite of institutions shaped by law, accountability and legitimacy.

His dissatisfaction grew during graduate studies in the United States, where he observed that academic and policy debates often reduced war to a political theater, ignoring institutional breakdown at its root. Over time, he developed an alternative framework, what he would later call “the Medical Approach to Peace,” treating the state as an organism, law as medicine, and institutions as organs determining the conditions for peace and war. This perspective asks not merely what politics does, but how institutions are designed: are they accountable, and do they deliver public goods justly and sustainably?

Created as a space to pursue these questions rigorously and practically, the State Health Institute is envisioned to act not simply as a think tank, but as a global watchdog tasked with monitoring the health of legislative bodies and political parties, and with holding the designers of institutions and laws to account.