Biographical Sketches
Keynote Speaker
Timor Sharan (LSE)
Dr Timor Sharan is the Executive Director of Afghanistan Policy Lab and a Fellow at the London School of Economics IDEAS foreign policy think tank. He was formerly the International Crisis Group's Senior Analyst for Afghanistan and worked as a senior public servant for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. He is the author of Inside Afghanistan: Political Networks, Informal Order, and State Disruption (2022).
Panel 1 - Unpacking Interventionism and State-Building
Diane Tippett (University of Sydney)
Diane Tippett is a second year PhD student in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Her doctoral thesis is entitled ‘The archaeology of Afghan political identities and implications for peacebuilding: a comparative study of Soviet and American occupations’. She is conducting field research interviews with Afghan diaspora communities and where possible, Afghans who remain in Afghanistan, with a view towards privileging and promoting Afghan voices, ontologies and epistemologies. Diane’s previous research has focussed on the North Caucasus (specifically Dagestan) and Central Asia, with the underlying theme being analysis of protracted identity-based conflicts and pathways to achieving peace with justice. Diane has a Master of Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Sydney, a Bachelor of Laws (Honours)/Bachelor of Arts (Politics and International Studies) from the University of Adelaide and a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the College of Law. She speaks English and Russian and is learning Persian.
Omar Sadr (University of Pittsburgh)
Dr. Omar Sadr is a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he worked as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF). His primary research interests include challenges of pluralistic coexistence, democratic governance, as well as politics of Afghanistan. Dr. Sadr holds a Ph.D. from South Asian University (SAU), a university established by the SAARC nations. His most recent book, Negotiating Cultural Diversity in Afghanistan, the winner of a 2022 book prize for Best Book in the Social Science from the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) investigates the pathological homogenizing state and theorizes a solution for the governance of a pluralistic society.
Mirwais Parsa (South Asian University)
Mirwais Parsa is a research scholar at the Center for Governance and Markets. He is finalizing his Ph.D. in economics at South Asian University with a focus on institutions and economic development. His research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions, and the political economy of Afghanistan. Mr. Parsa has served as a lecturer of Economics at Dunya University, Kabul, Afghanistan. In addition to his academic experience, he has served as an advisor to the Afghanistan Ministry of Finance. In this capacity, he drafted the second document of Afghanistan National Peace and Development Framework (ANPDF-II).
Sarajuddin Isar (SOAS University of London)
Sarajuddin Isar is a Political Economy researcher with extensive experience in taxation and state-building, banking and financial management. He has recently completed a PhD on the political economy of taxation and state-building in Afghanistan at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Isar is a researcher with the International Accounting Bulletin and worked with Open University, University of Edinburgh and Oxford Policy Management, UK. He was an AREU visiting scholar and worked with Oliver Wyman, Independent and BBC Persian London. He served as the Chief of Staff of the Governor of the Central Bank of Afghanistan and worked in different capacities with a series of international organisations including the USAID/BearingPoint, UN/WFP, the Catholic Relief Services, Acted, Afghanaid and Oxfam. He is a published academic author and contributor to a number of academic journals, media outlets and research think tanks across the UK and Afghanistan.
Panel 2 - Indigenous Institutions
Annika Schmeding (Harvard University)
Annika Schmeding is a cultural anthropologist and current Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows (2019-2023). Her work explores social change, politics and conflict, statelessness and minority rights, Islam, Sufism, and notions of religious civil society, identity and community formation in Afghanistan. She earned her doctoral degree in cultural anthropology (Boston University, 2020) and is the author of the forthcoming book “Sufi Civilities: Leadership, Resilience and Change among Sufi Communities in Afghanistan” (Stanford University Press, 2023) – based on 23-months of ethnographic research in Afghanistan. Her previous research on Afghanistan earned the Dutch National Master Thesis Prize in Asian Studies and the Leiden University Thesis Award. Her work has been published in a Routledge Compendium, the Afghanistan Journal, in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), in public cultural magazines such as Cabinet and is forthcoming in HAU journal of anthropological theory. She has worked in academia-adjacent fields, including contract research, advice on criminal proceedings, mentoring academics on media engagement and projects headed by a variety of organizations such as the Central Eurasian Scholars and Media Initiative (CESMI), People in Need (PIN) and the EU, the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, the Afghan Mobile Mini Circus (MMCC), as well as the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the International Human Rights Court in The Hague.
Zeynep Tuba Sungur (SOAS University of London)
Dr. Zeynep Tuba Sungur is a Visiting Researcher at SOAS University of London, conducting post-doctoral research on the comparative study of the Islamic Republics of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan in terms of the idea of nation in these countries. Dr. Sungur received her PhD degree in Area Studies from Middle East Technical University (METU, Turkey) in 2020, where she also worked as a Research Assistant in Graduate School of Social Sciences (2014-2019) and then as a Part-time Lecturer in Asian Studies (2021-22). Having specialised on Afghanistan with a focus on modernisation and nation-building through education, Dr. Sungur continues to work on the sociology and political history of South Asian countries in terms of their social structure, ethnic identities, modernisation processes and ideologies.
Yahia Baiza (Institute of Ismaili Studies)
Dr Yahia Baiza is a Research Associate at the Aga Khan Centre, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, United Kingdom. He specialises in education, history, and Islamic and Afghanistan studies, as well as the study of refugee and diaspora communities in Europe, and manuscript analysis. Also, he is the Regional Editor for Afghanistan for the Bloomsbury series Education and Childhood Studies. In this capacity, he develops and publishes digital resources on early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education levels, as well as childhood and youth studies in Afghanistan. He also serves as member of Academic Council of Hazara Encyclopaedia and oversees the academic aspects of the Encyclopaedia. Serving as a guest editor at Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2020-2022), he completed an edited volume, titled Education in Troubled Times: A Global Pluralist Response, published in August 2022. He is the author of Education in Afghanistan: Developments, Influences, and Legacies since 1901 (Routledge 2013 and 2017); and Education in Troubled Times: A Global Pluralist Response (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2022); and a forthcoming book, The Hazara Ismailis of Afghanistan and their History (Bloomsbury 2022). Furthermore, Yahia has published more than 80 academic articles in international journals, books and various media.
Marya Hannun (University of Exeter)
Marya Hannun is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on how women navigated the space opened up by the modernizing state in early 20th Century Afghanistan as well as the connections between Afghanistan's women's movement and women's organizing and reforms in the Middle East and South Asia.
Munazza Ebtikar (University of Oxford) & Mejgan Massoumi (Stanford University)
Munazza Ebtikar is a doctoral student at St John's College, University of Oxford, where she is completing her thesis on war and memory in Afghanistan. She holds an MPhil from Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2017), and completed her undergraduate education from UC Berkeley (2015). Munazza is a recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has published and presented in academic and non-academic platforms and works as an international consultant for various research and policy institutions.
Dr. Mejgan Massoumi is a fellow in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program at Stanford University. She obtained her PhD in History also from Stanford in June of 2021 with fi elds spanning across modern Central/South Asia and the broader Middle East. Her forthcoming monograph, The Sounds of Kabul: Radio and the Politics of Popular Culture in Modern Afghanistan, 1960-79, considers the mobile and fl uid international networks made possible through the producers and consumers of the radio and music in the twentieth century and the centrality of Afghan people to that story. She is the author of “Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate Cultural Production” Iranian Studies Special Issue on “Canon Formation and Persian Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century,” 55, 2022, 697-718. A forthcoming chapter is titled “Radio’s Internationalism: A View from Modern Afghanistan” in South Asia Unbound edited by Elisabeth Leake and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard. University of Chicago/Leiden University Press, 2023.
Panel 3 - Identity and Society
Rahman Mohammadi (University of Oxford)
Rahman Mohammadi is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. His research has previously focused on British Imperialism, Afghanistan, and state formation in the nineteenth century. He is currently researching the intellectual life of Abdul Ali Mazari and Hazara political thought during the 1980s and 1990s.
Barry Sadid (SOAS University of London)
Barry Sadid is a British-Afghan journalist working at BBC Monitoring on the Middle East team, and is completing a Master's in History at SOAS. His work focuses on early 20th century radicalism in Afghanistan, and the contemporary practice of oral history in the diaspora.
Anchita Borthakur and Angana Kotokey (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Anchita Borthakur and Angana Kotokey are PhD researcher scholars at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Both of them have presented their research work at many international conferences including at Copenhagen University, Cologne University, Russian Armenian University, Roma Tre University, European International Studies Association, Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement, Pondicherry University, Jawaharlal Nehru University etc. Both the authors have published research articles on Afghanistan in several peer-reviewed international and national journals including the Orient: The German Journal for Politics, Economics and Culture of the Middle East, Journal of Royal Society for Asian Affairs (Routledge), The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs (Routledge), Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (Routledge), World Focus etc. and contributed numerous chapters in books.
Neha Lund (Brown University)
Neha Lund is a first year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies and Training Center, and an affiliate at the Watson Institute for International Affairs. Neha graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in sociology and South Asia studies in 2022, where she wrote her award-winning honors thesis on Afghan Hindu conceptualizations of belonging and unbelonging across Kabul and the diaspora. She studies international migration, racialization, and South Asian diasporas with a specific focus on Afghan communities. As the daughter of Afghan Hindu refugees, she is driven to investigate Afghan displacement and identity formation.
Panel 4 - Migration, Dislocation and Resettlement
Louise Ryan, Maria Lopez and Alessia Dalceggio (London Metropolitan University)
Louise Ryan is Senior Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University. She has published widely on migration including co-editing three books: Gendering Migration (with Wendy Webster, 2008) Migrant Capital (with Umut Erel and Alessio D’Angelo, 2015) and most recently Revisiting Migrant Networks (with Elif Keskiner and Michael Eve, 2022). Louise has received numerous grants for her work on migration including five ESRC grants and three European research grants. Recent project: MIMY - Horizon2020 https://www.mimy-project.eu/.
Dr María López is a Reader in Sociology and Deputy Director of the GDIRC (London Metropolitan University). She is research fellow at the US-Mexico Centre (San Diego-California University, US) and author of Homosexuality and Invisibility in Revolutionary Cuba (2015) and co-author of Gender Violence in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Women's Writing (2022).
Alessia Dalceggio is a PhD student, and holder of a VC scholarship, at the School of Social Sciences and Professions at London Metropolitan University. Alessia’s research focuses on the experiences of forced migrant students in higher education and how they navigate the hostile environment.
Ceri Oeppen (University of Sussex)
Dr Ceri Oeppen is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), at the University of Sussex, UK. She has done research with the Afghan diaspora for almost two decades, including ethnographic fieldwork in India, the USA, the UK and Norway. She is co-editor of Beyond the ‘wild tribes’: Understanding modern Afghanistan and its diaspora’, and is currently working with colleagues at the University of Peshawar on the Protracted Displacement Economies project, exploring the economic lives of displacement-affected communities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.
Hameed Hakimi (University of Cambridge)
Hameed Hakimi is a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. He has over a decade of experience in policy advice, research and analysis, and project management. Among others, his policy research has focused on the politics and society in South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular), securitization policies in Europe, migration and displacements, regional connectivity between South Asia and Central Asia regions, Islamist militancy and extremism. He has extensive experience in policy advice including to parliamentary committees, has presented at high-level conferences and events, briefed governments and senior officials, and has published for policy and academia. His policy paper on the drivers of migration to Europe contributed to the findings that were presented to the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, at the Vision Europe Summit 2016 in Lisbon.
Hameed also is a member of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge where his interdisciplinary doctoral research at the Department of Sociology examines the reconceptualization of Security and the securitisation of migration in Europe. He obtained his MSc in International Security and Global Governance from Birkbeck College, University of London, his BA in Politics (with honours) from the Queen Mary University of London, and his qualification in research methodologies from the University of Birmingham.
Nina Khamsy (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Nina Khamsy is a PhD candidate at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), Switzerland. Her thesis in Anthropology entitled “Scales of Mobility of Afghan migrant youth in the digital era” is funded by the Swiss Science Foundation and is conducted under the co-supervision of Alessandro Monsutti, Till Mostowlansky and Zuzanna Olszewska.