Anand Gopal

Very few foreign journalists have spent as much time with members of the Taliban as Anand has. For his reporting on the Middle East, Anand has won a National Magazine Award, a George Polk Award, and three Overseas Press Club awards. He has reported for The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and other publications while also producing scholarship based on his fieldwork and complex network analysis. Anand’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Other Afghan Women,” an account based on his deep reporting in the rural villages of Afghanistan, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. It is one of the most comprehensive reports about the plight of Afghan women who have been forgotten in the dominant narrative about the war.

Anand is a fellow with the International Security Program at New America and was also a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow with the New America Fellows Program. He appeared in Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films’ 2009 documentary, Rethink Afghanistan, a film about the US military presence in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacked of September 11, 2001.

Anand has a PhD from Columbia University and is currently an Assistant Research Professor for the Center on the Future of War in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. His current work focuses on conflict, democracy, and inequality, and he is writing a book on the Arab revolutions.