Nilofar Sakhi is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. She is also a professorial lecturer of international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs George Washington University.

Previously, she was a visiting research fellow at Keough School of Global Affairs, Notre Dame University. She also served as a course coordinator and instructor at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute through a contract with McColm & Company where she was a director of policy and diplomacy. Sakhi taught at George Mason University and American University of Afghanistan. 

A former Fulbright fellow, Sakhi has written extensively on various aspects of traditional and nontraditional security, geopolitics of peace, peacemaking and peacebuilding processes, and human security. Her recent book is Human security and agency: Reframing productive power in Afghanistan. Currently, she is working on regional security with a case study on Afghanistan and South and Central Asia and exploring the domestic and external incongruences that impact regional peace diplomacy. 

Sakhi has been involved in assisting peace, development, human-rights and counter-insurgency policy formulation. A former visiting fellow at National Endowment for Democracy and Columbia University, and a former fellow at Asia Society and International Center for Tolerance Education, Sakhi has researched a wide range of research projects pertaining to politics of peace, security, negotiations, and mediation in peacemaking processes.

She served as a country director of the Open Society Foundation-Afghanistan and an executive director at the American University of Afghanistan where she also served as a trustee. She is a founder of an educational radio station, the first women’s organization in western zone of Afghanistan with a mission of political empowerment of women, and a library.

Sakhi has a PhD from George Mason University, a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a second master’s degree from Eastern Mennonite University. 

Featured Works:

Sakhi, N. (2020). Human Security & Agency: Reframing Productive Power in Afghanistan. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Sakhi, N. (2019). Moving Beyond Informality. Small Wars Journal.
Sakhi, N. (2019). Peacemaking in Afghanistan, Procedural and Substantial Challenges. Aljazeera Center for Studies.
Sakhi, N. (2019). The politics of Peace, the Collapse and Resumption of US-Taliban Peace Talks in Afghanistan. Aljazeera Center for Studies.