About — Chris Sands: War Studies Scholar

Chris Sands is a social scientist and former journalist with more than twenty years experience witnessing and writing about insurgent warfare. He specialises in researching the consequences of extreme violence on members of non-state armed groups.

After studying history and philosophy at the University of Brighton in 1999/2000, Chris left academia early to pursue his dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. He went on to work as a freelance journalist in the Occupied Palestinian Territories during the First Intifada and in Iraq during the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion. He also spent time working in Kuwait and the UAE as an editor and journalist for Middle Eastern newspapers, covering social justice issues and interviewing regional politicians including the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

In 2005, Chris moved to Kabul to report on the Taliban-led insurgency for Le Monde, The New Statesman, The Independent, Mother Jones and other international media. He lived there for over nine years, reporting independently from across Afghanistan and embedding with the Royal Gurkha Rifles, 82nd Airborne, the 1st Infantry Division, and the 10th Mountain Division. In 2013, Chris began work on a book about the Afghan Islamist party and insurgent group, Hizb-e Islami. Together with his co-author, Fazelminallah Qazizai, he went on to interview more than 300 people and collect secondary source material in Dari and Pastho as part of his research. Their book, Night Letters: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Afghan Islamists who Changed the World, was published by Hurst in 2019. That same year, Chris served as an expert witness on behalf of Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last Afghans detained at Guantanamo Bay. Asadullah was eventually released and reunited with his family in Afghanistan in 2022.

Chris returned to academia in 2020, when he enrolled part-time in the War Studies department at King’s College London. In 2022 he was awarded a War Studies MA with distinction. For his dissertation, he carried out a comparative study on the nature of violence in pre and post-9/11 insurgencies, looking at the Algerian War of Independence, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Al-Qaeda’s insurgency in Iraq and the Taliban’s insurgency in Afghanistan. While studying for his MA, he worked as South Asia Editor for New Lines Magazine. In this role he edited, commissioned, and wrote stories on the Taliban, the history of contemporary British jihadism and the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. In November 2023 an extract from Chris’s book, Night Letters, was published in the anthology A Thousand Golden Cities: 2,500 Years of Writing from Afghanistan and its People (Bloomsbury).

Chris is now a full-time academic in the War Studies department at King’s, where he is now working on a PhD examining the psychosocial costs of extreme violence for insurgents in Afghanistan. As well as being an accomplished researcher and author, he has featured as a guest speaker on war reporting and Afghanistan in forums hosted by LSE, Trinity College Cambridge, The Frontline Club, The Economist Educational Foundation, Freedom from Torture, and the Afghan Sustainable Economic Foundation. He has been interviewed about Afghanistan by the BBC and The Financial Times.