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).

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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.

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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.

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Accord Issue 27: Afghanistan

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).

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Accord Issue 27: Afghanistan

Professor Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in pre- war northern Afghanistan during the mid-1970s. He later taught at Wellesley, Harvard and Boston universities and is the author of several books on Afghanistan, Central Asia, China and anthropology. Since 2001 his research has focused on economic and political development in Afghanistan, particularly on law, government organisation and development issues.

Dr Anna Larson is the Accord 27 Issue Editor and a Senior Teaching Fellow in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has worked as a researcher in Afghanistan, writing on politics, democratisation and peace in Afghanistan since 2005. Anna is co-author with Noah Coburn of Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan: Elections in an Unstable Political Landscape(Columbia, 2014), and holds a PhD in post-war recovery from the University of York.

His Excellency Mohammad Kareem Khalili is Chairman of the High Peace Council of Afghanistan. HE Khalili served as Vice-President of Afghanistan from 2002–14 during both the Interim Administration and then under elected President Hamid Karzai.

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Accord Issue 27: Afghanistan