Dr. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili was a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She is an expert on political economy, foreign policy, and the challenges of building effective governance, with a focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan.

Murtazashvili is also the director of the Center for Governance and Markets and an associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the elected president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Murtazashvili is the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Land, The State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. Murtazashvili has extensive experience in the policy world, having served with the United States Agency for International Development in Uzbekistan and an advisor to the World Bank, the US Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Programme, and many others. Murtazashvili has conducted field research and numerous surveys throughout Central Asia and Afghanistan over the past twenty years.

Murtazashvili has a PhD in political science and an MA in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BSFS from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.