This academic year, there are two new Afghan student groups on campus: the Afghanistan Caucus at Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Afghan Students’ Association at Harvard College. The Mittal Institute spoke with Sal Parsa, co-founder of the Afghanistan Caucus, about their inaugural event on February 20 and further plans to foster a sense of unity and purpose among Afghan students and alumni.
Homeira Qaderi is an Afghan writer, activist, and educator and currently is a Radcliffe Fellow. She has written seven books in total, including Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son, which was excerpted by the New York Times and chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2020. This memoir, marked by courage and despair, tells the story of a son she left behind in Afghanistan. Before leaving Afghanistan, Qaderi taught at Gharjistan University, in Kabul, and worked as a senior advisor to both the minister of education and, earlier, the minister of labor, social affairs, martyrs, and the disabled. A lifelong human rights activist, Qaderi was awarded the Malalai Medal—Afghanistan’s highest civilian honor—for exceptional bravery by the president Afghanistan. She spoke with the Mittal Institute ahead of her talk, “Fiction in Afghanistan” on Friday, November 11.
Tania Saaed, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, and Marie Curie fellow at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, recently arrived at Harvard as part of her Marie Curie Fellowship with LMSAI. Her work focuses on comparative and international education, from exploring Islamophobia and securitization in the context of universities in the U.K., to the increasing securitization of education in Pakistan, and across South Asia. She spoke with the Mittal Institute about her work and fellowship.
The newly-published book, The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations, is the first collection of chapters related to Partition studies wherein experts of various disciplines from the three major modern nation-states affected by this cataclysm – Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan – have closely collaborated to develop a nuanced assessment of the Partition as active in the present as well as the past. It is edited by LMSAI Steering Committee member Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and Shubhangi Bhadada, Mittal Institute Fellow and Project Director, Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. We spoke with Jennifer and Shubhangi to learn more about the editing process, and what they hope people glean from the compilation.
Fara Abbas, a Fellow with the Negotiation Task Force, based at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, is a specialist on Afghan affairs with over 10 years of in-country experience on security, peace, and development. She fled Afghanistan in August after the Taliban takeover, and a stipend by a number of Harvard entities – including the Mittal Institute – is supporting her year-long Fellowship at Harvard.
This Harvard University panel, co-sponsored by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies’ Negotiation Task Force, explored the lead up to the collapse of the Afghan government, as well as what the new Taliban regime means for the future of the country and its people.
On Friday, October 15, the Mittal Institute and the Negotiation Task Force present “Afghanistan’s Next Transition: How we got here, and what comes next,” a focus on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Discussants will explore the lead up to the collapse of the Afghan government, and what the new Taliban regime means for the future of the country and its people. Arvid Bell spoke with the Mittal Institute about his work, and what we can expect the panelists to cover at the October 15 event. Arvid is a scholar and entrepreneur who specializes in complex conflict analysis, negotiation strategy, and international security. He is lecturer on Government at Harvard University, Director of the Negotiation Task Force at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Partner at Negotiation Design & Strategy (NDS), a training, advisory, and research development group.
In a talk on Friday, September 10, international journalists shared their perspectives on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan during . Watch the video from the event, “Implications: Regional Perspectives on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” which was sponsored by the Asia Center and co-sponsored by the Mittal Institute.