Home>Adam Baczko
Research Interest(s): Sociology of civil wars, Taliban courts in Afghanistan, armed conflict in Syria, Western military interventions, state formation in Mali, political economy in the context of violence in Mexico.
Discipline(s): Political Science
Subdiscipline(s): Political Sociology, Comparative Politics
Research Group(s): Violence, war and peace; State, political regimes, mobilisations; Global economy, capitalism, extraction
Geographical Area(s): Caucasus / Central Asia, Middle East, West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean
Country(ies): Afghanistan, Syria, Mali, Mexico
Language(s): French, English, Spanish, Polish
Biography
Adam Baczko is a research fellow at the CNRS, affiliated with the CERI (Sciences Po). His work, based on field research in contexts of violence, focuses on how institutions, norms and social orders are created in the midst of civil wars and international interventions. He is particularly interested in competing forms of authority – state, insurgent, customary, international – and how they legitimise, administer, judge, redistribute and govern in situations of radical uncertainty.
His research in Afghanistan showed how the Taliban established a system of courts, helping to legitimise their claim to embody the state in times of war. This work resulted in the publication of La guerre par le droit. Les tribunaux Taliban en Afghanistan (CNRS Éditions, 2021) and The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan. Waging War by Law (Oxford University Press, 2023). Together with Gilles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, he then analysed the social and political transformations produced by the Syrian civil war, research published in Syrie. Anatomie d’une guerre civile (CNRS Éditions, 2016) and Civil War in Syria. Mobilisation and Competing Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
His recent research focuses on the deconstruction of the state in Mali in the context of international aid and intervention, and on the effects of these mechanisms on bureaucracies, local institutions, modes of accumulation and regimes of legitimacy. This research will be the subject of a forthcoming book. Adam is currently conducting research in Mexico on economic growth in territories affected by violence, examining the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of violence, uncertainty and environmental damage in thriving sectors. This research is part of a broader comparative programme on thriving economies in contexts of violence.
In the past, Adam Baczko has been a Fulbright and Order, Conflict and Violence Fellow at Yale University, a Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM), a Trajectories of Change Fellow at the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, and a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University. Between 2016 and 2022, he was also a core researcher for the ERC programme ‘Social Dynamics of Civil Wars’. He is also one of the co-editors of the collection Logiques du désordre (Logics of Disorder) published by CNRS Éditions.
publications
Main publications
« La fabrique transnationale des guerres civiles La dimension internationale des phénomènes locaux », Revue française de science politique, 2025, vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 431-451 (with G. Dorronsoro).
The Taliban Courts. Waging War by Law in Afghanistan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023.
La guerre par le droit. Les tribunaux Taliban en Afghanistan, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2021.
Civil War in Syria. Mobilization and Competing Social Orders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018 (with G. Dorronsoro et A. Quesnay). Revised and expanded translation of the French version.
« Pour une approche sociologique des guerres civiles », Revue française de science politique, 2017, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 309-327 (with G. Dorronsoro).
Syrie. Anatomie d’une guerre civile, Paris, CNRS éditions, 2016 (with G. Dorronsoro et A. Quesnay).
See all publications on Sciences Po Institutional Repository