Dipali Mukhopadhyay

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She 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. Mukhopadhyay is currently working on her next book on sovereignty and state-building in the shadows of counterterrorism.

Mukhopadhyay previously served as Associate Professor of Global Policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School (2020-2024) and as Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (2012-2020). She was a post-doctoral fellow in 2011 at Princeton University and earned her PhD in International Relations at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in 2010. She earned her BA in Political Science at Yale University in 2002.

Professor 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 at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, Just Security, Lawfare, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and U.S. News and World Report, and her research has been featured in The Economist and The New York Times. She has been awarded funding/fellowships from, amongst others, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Eisenhower Institute, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, NYU’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.