Waging War by Law:

Taliban Courts in Afghanistan

Tuesday, October 7th, 2025

4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST)

In-Person Event

Elliott School of International Affairs, Voesar Conference Room, 4th Floor IERES. 

How did the Taliban gain the trust of the Afghan population through decades of conflict? How did they put themselves in a position to regulate social relations? And with what consequences for Afghan society? Based on his book Taliban Courts in Afghanistan. Waging War by Law, Adam Baczko will demonstrate that the movement achieved this not merely through military force or ideology, but by building a legal order. While the international coalition sponsored a corrupt and inadequate justice system, the Taliban established hundreds of courts across the countryside. By emphasizing due process, impartiality of judges, and the enforcement of verdicts, these courts became one of the few predictable institutions in the daily lives of Afghans. 

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2016 across multiple Afghan provinces, with rare access to Taliban judges and court users, Adam Baczko’s book rethinks the place of law and courts in contexts of civil war. It also sheds new light on why Western intervention failed and how the Taliban ultimately took over the country.

Speakers

Adam Baczko is a CNRS Research Associate Professor at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) of Sciences Po. His work focuses on the formation of legal institutions by armed movements and international actors in contexts of armed conflict, with extensive fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan, Syria, and Mali. He is the author of Taliban Courts in Afghanistan. Waging War by Law (Oxford University Press, 2023) and, with Gilles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, of Civil War in Syria: Mobilisation and Competing Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Benjamin D. Hopkins is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region, including The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, and Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. His latest book, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, won the Association of Asian Studies Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (2022).

Moderator

Eric Schluessel is an associate professor of history and international affairs, as well as the director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. He is a social historian of China and Central Asia, whose first monograph, a social history of late-Qing Xinjiang, won the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History. Dr. Schluessel is also the translator of Sayrami’s Tarikh-i Hamidi, a monument of Uyghur history-writing.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

The Central Asia Program

Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES)

Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

1957 E Street, NW | Suite 412 | Washington, DC | 20052

(202) 994-9509 | infocap@gwu.edu | centralasiaprogram.org

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