Jawed Nader has been the Director of British & Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group since 2012. He has extensive experience in promoting civil society and good governance in Afghanistan. He worked as the Director of the Afghanistan Land Authority (2009-2011), and as Advocacy Manager with the Afghan Civil Society Forum (2002-2006). He is from Ghazni, Afghanistan and holds a postgraduate degree in Public Policy from the University of Bristol.
Read more from Jawed:
Julius Cavendish lived in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2011, reporting for a range of titles including Time, the Independent, Christian Science Monitor, the Times, and The National. He interviewed many of the protagonists of the Sangin peace accords and wrote a detailed account of the saga for the Afghanistan Analysts Network. He now lives in London.
Read more from Julius:
Suhail Shaheen was educated at Kabul University and is a fluent English speaker and prolific writer. He edited the English- language, state-owned Kabul Times during the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, before being appointed Deputy Ambassador at the Afghan Embassy in Pakistan. He now serves as spokesman for the Taliban Political Office in Qatar.
Read more from Suhail:
Ambassador Douglas Lute is the former United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s standing political body. In 2010 he retired from active duty in the Army as a Lieutenant General after 35 years of service. In 2007 President George W. Bush named him as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor to coordinate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, serving a total of six years in the White House. General Lute holds degrees from the United States Military Academy at West Point and from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam is a social scientist and consultant currently working on Somalia. She is a part-time PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews researching Taliban identity. She has worked and travelled extensively in Afghanistan since 1995 and has worked with a range of international and national organisations including the European Union, the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the NATO International Security Assistance Force.
Professor Nazif Shahrani researches Islamic movements, identity politics in failed/failing nation states, Muslim family and gender dynamics, and the political ecology of state-society relations in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, Southwest Asia and the Middle East. His most recent books include Revolutions and rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological approaches (co-editor with Robert Canfield, Indiana University Press, 2018) and Modern Afghanistan: The impact of 40 years of war (editor, Indiana University Press, 2018).
Read more from Nazif:
Felix Kuehn is the co-editor of My Life with the Taliban, the autobiography of the former Taliban envoy to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef (Hurst, 2010); co-author of An enemy we created: The myth of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda merger, 1970–2010 (Hurst, 2012); co-editor of Poetry of the Taliban (Hurst 2012), a volume of poetry written by Taliban members; and co-editor of The Taliban Reader (Hurst, forthcoming).
Heela Najibullah is a peace and conflict researcher whose book Reconciliation and Social Healing in Afghanistan was published by Springer in January 2017. She has worked with the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) for eleven years on issues of migration in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe. She has also published articles and booklets on conflict management and reconciliation in South Asia. Her current position is Community Engagement and Accountability Delegate in the IFRC Regional Office of Europe.
Read more from Heela:
Dr Amin Tarzi is the Director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California’s Washington DC Program, and a Senior Fellow, Program on the Middle East, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is currently working on a book on Afghanistan’s state formation and borderisation.
Read more from Amin:
Dr Astri Suhrke is a political scientist and a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She has written widely on conflict and peacebuilding, both generally and with particular reference to Afghanistan. She is the author of When more is less: The international project in Afghanistan (Hurst, 2011).
Read more from Astri:
