Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh is a researcher, university lecturer and consultant based in Paris and specializing on human security, peacebuilding and radicalization, with geographic specialization in Central Asia and Afghanistan. She teaches at Sciences Po within the Paris School of International Affairs and runs a month long course on Human Security at the Summer School. Between 2006 and 2016 she led the Specialization on Human Security at the Master’s of Public Affairs (MPA).
Since 2010, she has been working as a consultant for the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy in Central Asia (UNRCCA) and the UN Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) engaged in the preparation and then implementation of the Action Plan for the Implementation of the UN Global Counter Terrorism Strategy in Central Asia.
Between 2010 and 2016, she was a Research Associate with the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) working on the ethics of liberal peacebuilding, on regional security complexes and on radicalization.
Since 2014, she has been the Academic Advisor to the Afghan Institute of Strategic Studies (AISS) and has provided guidance for the research and publication of a series of papers on radicalization in Afghanistan (in universities, in madrassas, in social media and in the police force).
Prior to moving to Paris to teach at Sciences Po, she taught at Columbia University (New York) as an adjunct professor and has been a visiting professor or researcher at universities in Kabul, New Delhi, Pretoria, Moscow and Dushanbe.
Between 1993-2003, she worked at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), working at the Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), based in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and in Bratislava (Slovakia) covering 27 countries of the region. She also worked at the Human Development Report Office at UNDP Headquarters in New York where she set up the National Human Development Report (NHDR) Unit in 2000 and ran a Community of Practice Network on Human Development. After leaving the UN in 2003, she contributed to the preparation of National Human Development Reports and was editor of reports in South Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Nepal and has worked with teams preparing the reports for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Djibouti and Kazakhstan among others. She has helped prepare the Reports on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for Azerbaijan (2013), Uzbekistan (2014) and Tajikistan (2014).
She has been collaborating extensively with the Human Security Unit at the UN in New York, for which she prepared a training manual for operationalizing the human security concept and has contributed to the Reports of the UN Secretary General on Human Security which led to a General Assembly Resolution in 2012.
Tadjbakhsh has further collaborated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, which chairs the Heart of Asia/Istanbul process, for whom she prepared a white paper on radicalization in the Heart of Asia countries in 2014. She further helped produce the Plan of Action for Implementing the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for Afghanistan between 2013-2014. In 2013, she prepared a background paper for the Office of the High Commissioner for National Minorities (HCNM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on the potential inter and intra-state ethnic conflicts in Central Asia and in northern Afghanistan. Other research collaboration has included with PRIO on the project on ‘Ethics of Liberal Peace’ and with the Spanish think tank FRIDE (Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior) on a project on the Implementation of Chapter VII Resolutions at the Security Council, with a case study on Afghanistan.
Between 2007-2008, she and ran a one year joint research project between the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and Kabul University researching on differences in perceptions on peacebuilding based on liberal values in Afghanistan and its alternatives. Tadjbakhsh holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Georgetown University (1987) a Master’s Degree (1991) and a Doctoral Degree (1994) from Columbia University.
She is Iranian-American and a resident of France.