“The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan” with Adam Baczko & Homeira Qaderi
October 8, 2025
Book talk on “The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan” with author Dr. Adam Baczko & Dr. Homeira Qaderi.
Date and time
Wednesday, October 8 · 3:30 – 4:45pm EDT
Location
NAC Flex 1/103160 Convent Ave New York, NY 10031Get directions
Good to know
Highlights
- 1 hour 15 minutes
- In person
About this event
Community • State
Join us for a book talk on The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan: Waging War by Law, featuring author Dr. Adam Baczko, CNRS Research Associate Professor at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) of Sciences Po. He will be in conversation with Agan writer Dr. Homeira Qaderi, lecturer at Yale University and Moynihan Academic Freedom Fellow.
How did the Taliban defeat militarily and technologically superior Western armies? How did they gain the trust of Afghan communities over decades of conflict? In The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan: Waging War by Law, Dr. Baczko explains how the Taliban strategically used law as a weapon of war, building a parallel justice system that outperformed the corrupt and dysfunctional legal institutions backed by the international coalition.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and unprecedented access to Taliban judges and court users, this book offers a fresh perspective on a country that endured over four decades of war. It challenges conventional narratives of counterinsurgency, highlights the critical role of rule of law in conflict settings, and provides urgent lessons for policymakers, experts, and the general public on the failures of recent Western interventions.
An audience Q&A will follow the discussion.
Adam Baczko | CNRS Research Associate Professor, Centre for International Studies
Adam Baczko is a CNRS Research Associate Professor at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) of Sciences Po. His work focuses on the formation of legal institutions by armed movements and international actors in contexts of armed conflict, with extensive fieldworks conducted in Afghanistan, Syria and Mali. He is the author of Taliban Courts in Afghanistan: Waging War by Law (Oxford University Press, 2023) and, with Gilles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, of Civil War in Syria: Mobilisation and Competing Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Homeira Qaderi | Moynihan Public Scholar, Research Assistant and Lecturer, Yale University
Dr. Homeira Qaderi, a native of Kabul, is a celebrated Afghan writer and a fearless champion for women’s rights and the advancement of Afghan civil society. Her journey to becoming a prominent figure in Afghan literature and activism began with her pursuit of a Ph.D. in Persian literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.
She has written seven books, including her acclaimed novel Noqra: The Daughter of Kabul River. She has written several books for the children of Afghanistan. Before leaving Afghanistan, Qaderi taught at several universities in Kabul and worked in two different Afghan government administrations earlier as a senior advisor to the minister of social affairs labor and, more recently, as a senior advisor to the minister of education.
Homeira Qaderi founded the Golden Needle Literary Society in 2021 and has taught and trained hundreds of young Afghans in Fiction Writing. Qaderi was also Editor-in-Chief of Rah-e Madaniyat Daily in Kabul from 2019 to 2021.
As a lifelong activist and staunch defender of women’s rights, Homeira Qaderi was awarded the Malalai Medal, Afghanistan’s highest civilian honor, for exceptional bravery by the President of Afghanistan in 2015. She was also a writer in residence at the University of Iowa in 2015.
Homeira Qaderi’s first book in English translation, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son (Harper, 2020), was excerpted by the New York Times and chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books as well as TIME Magazine.
Following the fall of Kabul, Dr. Qaderi was appointed as a fellow at the prestigious Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Currently, she serves as a Writer in Residence at Yale University, where she continues to inspire and educate through her literary works and advocacy.