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February 22, 2006

Ph.D. Research Profile - Dipali Mukhopadhyay

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is a Ph.D. student in the area of security studies at The Fletcher School. Having grown up in various countries around the world, Dipali says that she has always been an internationally-minded person. Her interest in international politics began when she was in high school.

“When I was in ninth grade, my high school teacher took us to one of those model UN conferences where we pretended we were representing various countries,” Dipali recalls. “From that point onward, I realized that international politics interested me.”

As a freshman at Yale University, Dipali took an introductory international relations class and was immediately hooked to the subject. “I thought that it was such an interesting lens through which to look at politics and at war – which is what I was immediately interested in,” she says. “I wanted to know why wars happen and why everyone participates in them – even though it doesn’t seem to make any sense to participate – and why they evolve in a certain trajectory over and over again. I wanted to understand the dynamics of war.”

Dipali’s association with Fletcher began long before she joined the program as a MALD student. As an undergraduate, she spent a summer doing research with Professor Hurst Hannum on the eastern Congolese refugee camps that emerged after the Rwandan genocide. Her interests in war and refugees evolved and strengthened through her college years.

It was later, between her junior and senior years at college, that she found a subject that would continue to interest her for years to come: Afghanistan. While interning for an organization called Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Dipali was exposed to security issues surrounding humanitarian crises.

“That was when I got introduced to the Afghan refugee crisis,” she remembers. “This was a month before 9/11. I was in touch with people working in Pakistan dealing with refugees from Afghanistan, when 9/11 happened and the issue sort of exploded in the news. It was then that I realized that my inkling to study Afghanistan was right.”

After graduating from Yale, Dipali worked at the Carnegie Endowment. “I was in the non-proliferation project, and my time there coincided with the lead-up to the Iraq war,” she says. “We were working on finding a middle ground between inspections and war. Carnegie proposed a third alternative, and I ended up learning a lot about weapons inspections and weapons intelligence. It was a great year.”, she says. She also spent part of her summer in Afghanistan with the Aga Khan Foundation doing post-conflict analysis between her first and second years at Fletcher.

At Fletcher Dipali has finished her coursework and is preparing for her comprehensive exams and working on her dissertation proposal this semester so that she can go back to Afghanistan in the summer to do some field work for her dissertation. “I am focusing on post-conflict state-building processes and how the actors whom we call ‘warlords’ interact with the process of rebuilding the state,” Dipali explains, “As the different political processes move forward during post-conflict reconstruction, warlords of different levels are interacting with these processes. I want to see if there are, in fact, constructive roles for them to play under the new political scenario. There are questions of whether certain actors, who have been invested in war, are capable of contributing positively to the changes that are happening around them, or whether they are a hindrance to the process. As the country undergoes a transformation through a constructive state-building process, there is a question of whether or not these warlords are capable of transforming along with it.”

In her dissertation, Dipali wants to investigate the role of warlords at various levels, including local commanders who have a presence in villages or districts and nationally-known figures like Ishmail Khan or Abdul Rashid Dosam.

“These are people who are both warriors and political figures, and that’s why they are called warlords,” she says. “There are, I think, correlates in other histories to the Afghan experience – in Medieval Europe, there were barons who had militias and control of land, in China there were former generals who had control over armed groups and had political influence and were called warlords. I am focused on Afghanistan because I feel that it will provide a better understanding of how warlords interact with state-building in the post-conflict context, which I hope to contrast with more organic state-building processes that have taken place in the past”.

Dipali will look at these warlords from the perspective of the local people that they influence, as well as institutions on the ground, like the parliament. She also plans to go into the archives and study their roles from a historical perspective. She feels that her biggest challenge will be methodological: “It is not easy to interview warlords,”she says with a smile. She hopes to learn from those on the ground who study these issues regularly in order to develop a sound approach for her own research.

After completing her Ph.D., Dipali would like to remain in academia as a teacher, but she. In the future, she sees herself teaching, but would also like to be involved in policy work in government and non-governmental settings. Outside of Fletcher, Dipali spends much of her time planning her wedding, which will take place in India during the summer of 2006. She also loves to cook and has plans to resume her long-time hobby of playing the piano this semester.

By Shinjinee Chattopadhyay, MALD '07

Posted by jessica at February 22, 2006 12:15 PM