Mohammad Sayed Madadi

The Alternative Path to Democracy: A Practical Guide to Decentralization in Afghanistan

Mr. Sayed Madadi is the former director of foreign relations at the Afghanistan State Ministry for Peace, where he was also a senior member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghanistan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. Previously, he served as director general of the Afghanistan Civil Service Institute, where he spearheaded the establishment of a Public Administration Innovation Lab and the Good Governance Resource Center, among other noteworthy initiatives. Prior to that, Mr. Madadi held positions with Stanford University and the Middle East Institute, where he is now a nonresident scholar. He was a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and a Fulbright Scholar at New York University. His writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, the National Interest, Al-Jazeera English, the Diplomat, and BBC Persian, among other outlets. During his visiting fellowship, co-sponsored by the Carl Gershman Fund for Democracy Advocates at Risk, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative (TSI), Mr. Madadi was based at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets, where he continued his research and writing on a roadmap for a decentralized political system in Afghanistan.