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Books Human security, A Rock Between Hard Plac, Tajikistan: A Forgotten Civil War | ||
Shahrbanou tadjbakhsh book launch a rock between hard places afghanistan as
Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh (born 5 December 1965 in Tehran) is an Iranian author known for her work on the concept of human security and for her contribution to conflict resolution and peace building on the republics of Central Asia and Afghanistan as a researcher, lecturer and United Nations consultant. She is also the leader of the Human Security Specialization at the Master’s of Public Affairs of the Institute of Sciences Po in Paris. Her books are held in libraries worldwide.
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Post-independence Tajikistan and civil war
Shahrbanou started researching conflicts in Central Asia during her PhD on the Tajik Civil War. Her work on this little known conflict gave insight to the causes and consequences of the war as well as the peace process which led to the 1997 signing of the UN brokered Peace Accord Studies in Moscow and at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, New York, and how the relatively successful peace process in Tajikistan compared with the failed one in Afghanistan.
Her involvement with the United Nations started in 1995, when she led a team of researchers to survey 1000 women in Tajikistan in order to understand the relationship between women economic security and conflict. After 1997, she joined the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) leading the gender in development programs first in Central Asia and the Caucasus and subsequently covering 27 countries in the Commonwealth of Independent Stated (CIS) and Central and Eastern Europe.
Human Development Reports
In 2000, Tadjbakhsh moved to the Headquarter of UNDP in New York to advise the newly created National Human Development Reports Unit and developed the Corporate Policy to guide the production of the national reports in 135 countries. She also led a global network for UNDP of the community of practice development and the reports (2000-2003). While she left UNDP in 2003, she has continued to work as a consultant on the National Human Development Reports of Afghanistan, Mongolia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, Pakistan, Djibouti, Central and Eastern Europe, Egypt etc.
Contributions to the concept of human security
Having experienced how transition to the market economy wiped out securities and guarantees in terms of access to jobs, pensions, healthcare etc. in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Tadjbakhsh became interested in the concept of Human security . In 2003, she collaborated with the Commission on Human Security in their outreach activities in Central Asia. She then began teaching courses on the concept first at the School of International and Public Affairs University and then at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)
In 2007, she co-authored with Anuradha Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University a book called Human Security: Concepts and Implications (Routledge) which looks at the genesis of the concept, its critiques, and its application to the field of policy. She also started a student run, peer reviewed academic journal Human Security Journal/La Revue de la Sécurité Humaine at Sciences Po which ran 8 volumes between 2004 and 2008. The journal is now housed at l'Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III.
Tadjbakhsh, who now heads the specialization on Human Security at the Master’s of Public Affairs at Sciences Po, is an advocate of the broad definition of Human Security which encompasses not only freedom from fear, but also freedom from want and indignity. She also runs the Sciences Po Human Security Summer School In 2013, she delivered a lecture as part of the Kapuscinski Lecture series sponsored by UNDP and the European Commission on the theme of Human Security at the University of Riga and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia at a time when the country was preparing for its upcoming presidency of the European Union. The lecture proposed the use of the Human Security concept not only as foreign or aid policy of European and northern countries, but also as a principle for domestic policies to deal with the aftermath of the crisis in the region.
Tadjbakhsh has cooperated with the Human Security Unit at the UNOCHA in developing a manual on how to use the Human Security framework for implementing and evaluating policies and programs, which she used to conduct various trainings at the national and regional levels for the UN.
Lessons for peace building in Afghanistan
Tadjbakhsh extended the concept of human security to the context of peace building in Afghanistan since the 2002 intervention She was the Editor in Chief of the first National Human Development Report on Afghanistan in 2004, called Security with a Human Face leading a team of 30 Afghan researchers and writers. The report argued for a new model of security in response to people’s needs for safety but also jobs, food, safe water, equality, environmental sustainability, etc. She subsequently contributed to the preparation of major policy documents in Afghanistan, the latest being the National Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in 2014.
Between 2007 and 2008, she led a joint research project between Kabul University and Sciences Po on whether current models of peace-building were adequate and well understood at the local level. The study focused on the different perceptions of peace building models (democratization and marketization) based on liberal values and the results were published as part of a book she edited, Rethinking the Liberal Peace – External Modules and Local Alternatives (Routledge, 2011). She further looked at the case of Afghanistan for a study on the Implementation of Chapter VII Resolutions at the Security Council for the Spanish think tank FRIDE (Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior)
In recent years, she has written on the linkages between Central Asia and Afghanistan, including producing a study for the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy in Central Asia on the security concerns in the region following the withdrawal of foreign forces in 2014. Since 2010, she has collaborated as a Research Associate with the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) Peace Research Institute Oslo where she produced three case studies for the project on Afghanistan in a Neighborhood perspective (the cases of South Asia and is currently writing a book on Regional Security Complexes around Afghanistan together with the Director, Kristian Berg Harpviken under contract with Hurst Publishers.
Membership
Tadjbakhsh served on the advisory board of the Cahiers de L’Orient, Paris in 2007-2008 and was a member of the Board of Governors of Jacobs University/International University of Bremen Germany between 2008 and 2010. During the 1990s, she served as an Advisory Board Member of the Central Asian Monitor (1993-2000). She is also on the Advisory Board of the Afghanistan Institute for Strategic Studies.