I have spent most of my professional life understanding how things actually work in places where that is difficult to do — and making that legible to people who want to interact with it.
From 2006 I was based in southern Afghanistan, later working across Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, and Somalia. The work was always the same at its core: build relationships, earn trust, observe carefully, and map out how groups organise, govern, resolve disputes, and make decisions. I have particular depth in Pashtun tribal structures, customary law, and local legal traditions, and in how armed groups build administrative and judicial authority.
The environments I have worked in reward patience, attention to detail, and the absence of judgement. Everything I produce — whether a policy briefing, an expert report for court, or a research design — draws on deep local knowledge of how these places, organisations, and people work, and where possible direct engagement with primary sources and original documentation.
I co-led multi-year research programmes on Taliban political dynamics at Queen’s University Belfast, funded by the UK Foreign Office and the German Federal Foreign Office, managing multi-country teams and producing regular briefings for senior government officials. I also led the Taliban Sources Project, indexing and digitising over 2 million words of Taliban documents spanning 1979–2014 — one of the only private archives of its kind.
Much of what I do involves bridging between worlds that do not naturally communicate well with each other. I have advised the German government and others, briefed the US Senate and the UN Sanctions Committee, and presented at Harvard, Princeton, Chatham House, Brookings, the US War College, and the British Defence Academy. I currently consult for legal defence organisations on national security cases.
I co-founded First Draft Publishing. My books, published by Hurst / Columbia University Press, include An Enemy We Created (Sir Michael Howard Excellence Award), 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