Sippi Azarbaijani Moghaddam

Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam is an Iranian-born British national, Oxford graduate, international consultant and social scientist with 28 years’ experience in conflict and post-conflict settings, notably Afghanistan. She specialises in a range of topics while working with international and local governments and military actors, local leaders, civil society and communities.

From the 1990s onwards, she worked on negotiating access with the Mujahideen and the Taliban to work with women in a range of communities. She worked extensively with Afghan civil society and with local leaders from the Taliban period into the post-Taliban era. From 2007 she started researching civil-military relations and advised the British military command in Southern Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012 as an Afghanistan expert. From 2013 onwards she has continued her work in both security and civil society sectors in Afghanistan. She has published and presented extensively on Afghanistan but has also worked in Pakistan, Tajikistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Indonesia and Kenya.

She is currently a PhD candidate in International Relations on pre-2001 Taliban Identity at the University of St Andrews.