169: Jennifer Murtazashvili on Democracy and Informal Order in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan

Jennifer Murtazashvili is professor and director of the International Development Program at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

Her research explores questions of governance, public administration, and local institutions with a geographical focus on Central and South Asia and the former Soviet Union.

Jennifer’s first book, Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

A second book, Land, the State, and War: Property Rights and Political Order in Afghanistan (with husband Ilia Murtazashvili) is under revision.

Professor Murtazashvili’s current projects include research related to the (unexpected) role of bureaucracy in conflict-affected states, local governance and social institutions in Central Asia, and the geopolitics of Central Eurasia.

Jennifer also serves as an elected member of the Central Eurasian Studies Society executive board.

Her research reflects extensive field experience where she has lived on the ground for five years in former Soviet Central Asia and about three years in Afghanistan.

She has collected diverse types of original data employing a wide range of tools to answer important policy questions ranging from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, focus group discussions, public opinion surveys, as well as field experiments.

In addition to academic endeavors, Professor Murtazashvili remains deeply engaged in public policy.

For three years, she served as a democracy and governance officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and for more than a year as a Senior Research Officer at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.

Jennifer has also served as an advisor for a number of organizations including the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF.

She has a Ph.D. in Political Science and a M.A. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Books:

Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan by Jennifer Murtazashvili

The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan by Jenny Norberg

Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran

Charlie Wilson’s War : The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History by George Crile

Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics (Analytical Perspectives On Politics) by Barbara Geddes

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