Middle East Seminar
Date and Time
Location
The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan, Waging War by Law
Speaker
- Adam Baczko, Research Associate Professor, CNRS, SciencesPo.
Discussant
- Thomas Barfield, Professor of Anthropology, Boston University.
Contact
Liz Flanagan
eaf073@fas.harvard.edu
Bio
I am a Research Fellow at the CNRS, based at the CERI (Sciences Po). I am also a core researcher in the ERC Programme Social Dynamics of Civil Wars at Pantheon-Sorbonne University. Prior, I was a Trajectories of Change Fellow at the Zeit-Stifnung in Hamburg, a Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM (Institute for Human Science, Vienna) and an Order, Conflict and Violence Fellow at Yale University. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from the EHESS.
My main research area is the establishement of legal institutions by armed movements. My fieldwork-based doctoral dissertation, La guerre par le droit : justice, domination et violence en Afghanistan (2001-2018), examines the legal system established by the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan since the start of the Western military intervention. I demonstrate that, contrary to the common understanding of civil wars as situations of lawlessness, they are caracterised by intense competition between legal systems to be recognized as the official Law.
My parallel research project, carried out with Gilles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, has explored the social dynamics of the Syrian Civil War starting with the 2011 mobilization, the formation of insurgent civil and judicial institutions and the fragmentation of the country between the various belligerants. This research was published in French (Syrie, "Anatomie d’une guerre civile"), and in English ("Civil War in Syria: Mobilization and Competing Social Orders").