The Taliban Sources Project - Incite at Columbia University

Completed Project

The Taliban Sources Project

  • Team Anand Gopal Alex Strick van Linschoten Felix Kuehn
  • Funded by Thesigers

The Taliban Sources Project was a joint effort by Anand Gopal, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and Felix Kuehn to collate, digitise and translate primary source documents associated with the Afghan Taliban movement.

In 2017, the three researchers released the article “Ideology in the Afghan Taliban” that examined the documents and concluded that the Afghan Taliban’s ideology is a) the result of a sophisticated internal logic that has changed in subtle but important ways over the years, b) the origins of the Taliban’s ideology lie in the southern Pashtun village, not the Pakistani refugee camp, and 3) their thinking is heavily infused with Sufism.

Incite provided administrative support to Gopal through a two-year grant from Thesigers.

Related Works

More Projects

  • go to Terra:Soul
    Terra:Soul
    Environmental storytelling with the concept of reciprocity at its core.
  • go to Recovery
    Recovery
    Navigating the concept of recovery in social and political life through fields of governance, biomedicine, climate change, and economics.
  • go to Documenting the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement
    Documenting the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement
    Capturing the untold stories of Israel's largest grassroots protest movement through intimate interviews with twenty leading organizers. Part of the Left Field Fund
  • go to Obama Scholars Global Leadership Study
    Obama Scholars Global Leadership Study
    Tracing the life trajectories and networks of global leaders in a ten-year longitudinal study. Funded by Columbia University