About

I work on the politics, governance, and social organisation of conflict-affected societies in the Middle East and South Asia.

From 2006 I was based in southern Afghanistan, later working across Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, and Somalia. The work was consistently the same: build relationships, observe carefully, and map how groups organise, govern, resolve disputes, and make decisions. My research has focused in particular on Pashtun tribal structures, customary law, and local legal traditions, and on how armed groups build administrative and judicial authority.

The environments I have worked in require patience, attention to detail, and direct engagement with primary sources and original documentation. Everything I produce — whether a policy briefing, an expert report for court, or a research design — draws on that kind of fieldwork.

I co-led multi-year research programmes on Taliban political dynamics at Queen’s University Belfast, supported by the UK Foreign Office and the German Federal Foreign Office. I also led the Taliban Sources Project, which indexed and digitised over 2 million words of Taliban documents spanning 1979–2014.

I have worked with government ministries, legal defence organisations, and international institutions on research and advisory projects, and have presented findings at academic and policy venues in Europe and the United States.

I co-founded First Draft Publishing. My books, published by Hurst / Columbia University Press, include An Enemy We Created, My Life with the Taliban, Poetry of the Taliban, and The Taliban Reader.

PhD, War Studies, King’s College London · BA, Arabic & Development Studies, SOAS.

LinkedIn · First Draft Publishing · kuehn_contact [at] mm.st