A new Manfred Wörner Chair in Afghanistan
A newly created Manfred Wörner Chair for International Security Studies has been established in Kabul, Afghanistan. It has been set up at the Law and Political Science Faculty of Kabul University, in order to honour NATO’s achievements and sacrifices in the country through the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and in memory of the former NATO Secretary General, Dr. Manfred Wörner, who led NATO’s transformation into a modern alliance.
Following a competition among scholars at public and private universities in Afghanistan, Professor Dr Alef-Shah Zadran, Head of the Social Sciences Department of the National Centre for Policy Research and a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Kabul University, has been selected as the first holder of this Manfred Wörner Chair. As such, he will conduct high-quality research on security-related topics, in particular, on NATO’s achievements in Afghanistan as an independent, yet local researcher, and reach out to a wide community of stakeholders in academia and civil society with which he will share his findings.
Professor Zadran is a highly qualified academic, holding a PhD degree from the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY, U.S.A. He has a broad experience both as a teacher and a researcher, with about 80 publications in English, Dari and Pashto to his name.
NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division has created this chair in time for the start of the autumn semester in Afghanistan.