AWC Welcomes New Commissioner Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Ph.D.
March 25, 2024
The Afghanistan War Commission’s co-chairs Shamila N. Chaudhary and Dr. Colin F. Jackson, today welcomed the appointment of Dr. Dipali Mukhopadhyay as the AWC’s newest commissioner. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Jack Reed appointed Dr. Mukhopadhyay (pronounced Moo-kho-paa-dyiy) to replace former commissioner Michael D. Lumpkin. With Dr. Mukhopadhyay’s appointment, the Afghanistan War Commission returns to the full 16 commissioners prescribed by statute.
“We are thrilled Dr. Dipali Mukhopadhyay has been appointed to the Afghanistan War Commission, and thank Chairman Reed for the appointment,” said co-chairs Chaudhary and Jackson. “Her pathbreaking scholarship at leading research institutions will complement the contributions of all of our colleagues on the Commission, and will ensure we can fulfill our Congressional mandate to craft an in-depth, independent, objective and candid study of the war. It will be a pleasure and privilege to work alongside Commissioner Mukhopadhyay.”
Dr. Dipali Mukhopadhyay currently serves as Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She previously served as Associate Professor of Global Policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School and as Assistant and Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was a post-doctoral fellow in 2011 at Princeton University and earned her Ph.D. in International Relations at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in 2010. She earned her B.A. in Political Science magna cum laude at Yale University in 2002.
Dr. Mukhopadhyay is the author of Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which was short-listed for the biennial Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences, and, with Kimberly Howe, Good Rebel Governance: Revolutionary Politics and Western Intervention in Syria(Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her scholarly work has also been published in the British Journal of Political Science; Conflict, Security, and Development; Economics and Politics; Foreign Affairs; International Negotiation; Perspectives on Politics; and a number of edited volumes. Her co-edited volume (with Anna Larson and Omar Sharifi), Power and Authority in Afghanistan: Rethinking Politics, Intervention, and Rule is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Dr. Mukhopadhyay is currently working on her next book on sovereignty and state-building in the shadows of counterterrorism.
Dr. Mukhopadhyay teaches on political violence, non-state armed actors, state formation, the politics and law of military intervention, and qualitative research methods. She serves as the Vice President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies and as a Senior Expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has received funding and fellowships from, among others, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Eisenhower Institute, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Background
In FY 2022, a bipartisan group of members of the U.S. Congress from majority and minority leadership and various committees (Foreign Affairs; Intelligence; Armed Services) appointed the following fifteen commissioners to the Commission:
Dr. Anand Gopal
Luke Hartig
Dr. Seth Jones
Laurel Miller
LTC (ret.) Chris Molino
Gov. Bob Taft
Dr. Andrew Wilder
Shamila N. Chaudhary, Co-Chair
Dr. Colin F. Jackson, Co-Chair
Michael Allen
LTG (ret.) Robert Ashley
Jeremy Bash
Amb. Ryan Crocker
Jeffrey Dressler
Daniel Fata
Click here to read biographies of the Commissioners.
Click here to read about key staff hires on the Commission.
Click here to read the full text of Sec. 1094 of the FY22 NDAA establishing the Commission.
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