Events

Global Reflections on Afghanistan: A Roundtable Discussion

March 2, 2022 - 5pm

Hybrid Event

This event will be both an in-person and virtual event. The event will be held in David Rubenstein Forum, 1201 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Register Here to attend either in-person or to receive a zoom link to attend virtually.

In September 2021, the longest war in U.S. history came to an end as American military forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Join a panel of expert voices on Afghanistan as they reflect on the two decades of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, the chaotic end to the U.S. military mission, and the global context of these events.

This event will take place in-person with limited capacity. Please visit goforward.uchicago.edu for a full list of UChicago COVID-19 precautions and guidelines. A livestream option will be available.

Hosted by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Center for East European & Russian/Eurasian Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. This event is supported by Title VI grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & CivilizationsUChicago Amnesty International, and the Partnership for the Advancement of Refugee Rights. Please email Krishna Kulkarni at kskulkarni@uchicago.edu if you have any questions.

Panelists:
Anand Gopal is a journalist covering the Middle East, and a scholar who studies political violence. His reporting on Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He is the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes,” which won the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award. He has won the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the National Magazine Award for his reporting from Iraq.

Barnett R. Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the NYU Center on International Cooperation, where he previously directed the Afghanistan Pakistan Regional Program. From 2009-2013, Rubin was the Senior Adviser to the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the U.S. Department of State. In 2001, Rubin served as special advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement. He subsequently advised the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the drafting of the constitution of Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Compact, and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy.

May Jeong is an award-winning magazine writer and investigative reporter. She is best known for her months-long investigation into the MSF hospital bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan for The Intercept. This won her the 2017 South Asian Journalists Association’s Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Report on South Asia, as well as the Prix Bayeux Calvados Award for War Correspondents in the Young Reporter category.

M. Nazif Shahrani is Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian and Middle East Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for International Scholars. He is the author of “Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War” (2002) and editor of “Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives” (2018) and “Modern Afghanistan: The Impact of 40 Years of War” (2018).

Thomas Barfield is a social anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among pastoral nomads in northern Afghanistan. He is the author of, “Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History” (2010), a book that received an outstanding title award for American Library Association in 2011.  He has served as President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies since 2005.

Gil Stein is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the UChicago Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and at the Oriental Institute. He also serves as Director of the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation. His research investigates the development of the earliest urbanized states in the Near East, ancient economies, the archaeology of colonialism, inter-regional interaction, zooarchaeology, and the preservation of cultural heritage. He conducts cultural heritage preservation projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia (Uzbekistan).