The Brown University Library has received the books and papers of the late Michael V. Bhatia ’99, an Afghanistan expert and coauthor of Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in May 2008 while serving as a civilian member of a U.S. Army Human Terrain Team.
The Library is honored to house Bhatia’s collection of scholarly books, along with his papers, conference proceedings, and other writings, which were generously donated by his family. Included in Bhatia’s library were posters from the first election in Afghanistan; these have been preserved and are located in the University Archives in the John Hay Library.
Bhatia was widely recognized as a passionate and highly accomplished scholar who was working on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University at the time of his death. The Human Terrain System embedded social scientists and anthropologists like Bhatia with combat troops in order to help the troops better understand the cultural dynamics in which they were operating. Bhatia used his considerable expertise on humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, and the culture of Afghanistan to mediate disputes and negotiate solutions with local tribal elders.

Bhatia had developed that expertise by serving as an intern with the U.N. High Commission for Refugees in Saharan Africa before graduating magna cum laude in international relations from Brown in 1999 and by working for nongovernmental organizations in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and East Timor. He was also a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies from 2006 to 2007, teaching a senior seminar called “The U.S. Military: Global Supremacy, Democracy, and Citizenship; and was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford. Associate editor of the journal Foreign Affairs Sasha Polakow-Suransky ’01, who was a student at Oxford at the same time Bhatia was, described him as “one of the most promising diplomats” in America and “one of the most formidable and unconventional minds ever to emerge from the Van Wickle Gates.”
Watson Institute Professor James Der Derian, who worked with Bhatia at Brown, directed a documentary called Human Terrain: War Becomes an Academic, focusing on the Human Terrain System and Bhatia’s experience. The soon-to-be-released documentary won the Audience Award at Florence, Italy’s November 2009 Festival dei Popoli, the oldest documentary film festival in the world.