About Michael Vinay Bhatia

Michael Vinay Bhatia, 31, died Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Khost, Afghanistan where he was serving as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department.

Michael was born in Upland, CA on August 23, 1976 to Manik D. and Linda L. (Dolback) Bhatia of Medway, MA. He graduated from Medway High School in 1995 and attended Brown University, where he graduated Magna cum Laude and Honors with a B.A. in International Relations in 1999.


Michael was the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Scoville Peace and Disarmament Fellowship and a Marshall Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. At Oxford, Michael earned his M.Sc. in International Relations Research in 2002, and was working on his doctoral dissertation “The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978 – 2004.” Recently, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and a lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa.


Michael dedicated his life to humanitarian work and conflict resolution in war-torn countries. His research and humanitarian work brought him to the Sahrawi refugee camps in Western Algeria, East Timor, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He was a published author and contributor to a number of international relations publications.


In addition to his parents, he is survived by, his sister Tricia Lynn Bhatia of Medway and many aunts, uncles and cousins.


In lieu of flowers, donations in Michael’s memory may be made to the Michael V. Bhatia Memorial Fund c/o Rockland Trust Company, 288 Union St., Rockland, MA 02370.

Jarat Chopra, Michael's mentor at Brown, authored this article in the Brown Alumni Magazine.



The Loss of a Heart and a Mind
By Jarat Chopra   

Heartbroken and desolate, in this most difficult of all passages to write, I lament the bitter loss of Michael Bhatia. I offer a personal testament in tribute to an acclaimed man of letters and man of action. The inexpressible friendship we shared is engraved in my experience of Brown and of far-flung reaches where profound human events marked us indelibly.

Idealist and Realist

I quickly dubbed him “Bhatia,” which he countered with “Chopra”, a familiarity that stuck. He arrived as an undergraduate struck by lightning, a bolt that determined his knowledge of what he wanted to do, whatever form it might finally take. Rarely is gravitas located in youth, yet here it was; not wrapped in cynicism, as it invariably is, but grounded in boundless optimism and endless possibilities. In Bhatia, a firm moral compass matched a sense of humor, good fun, and enjoyment of life, while an insatiable curiosity explored the myriad richness of intellectual thought, distant shores, and interesting acquaintances. He had long since embarked on what he labeled his “vision quest.”

    Durable qualities would be critical ingredients of survival later on when, after beholding terrible scenes in troubled spots, he could re-center on what “goodness”, however limited, may mean and answer for himself the question “how to be?” His clarity of purpose and struggle to find meaning in life kept him balanced through turbulence.

    For Bhatia, the world remained always a magical place, even when it was deplorable as well, and through that magic he generated opportunities—opportunities precisely for mitigating what was dreadful. It is difficult to perceive the full extent of a big picture or to possess the creative imagination for big ideas without being a romantic and an idealist. It entails, additionally, a particular, virtually transcendental, capability to translate and transform dreams and ideals into real and tangible actions, and Bhatia was always engaged in the serious business of bridging these two realms. It is harder still to achieve effectiveness in practice without being crushed by the forces of pessimism that, in public as in private affairs, render good intentions into mere camouflage for specific interests. Reconciling this tension is what it takes to balance the two parallel careers of letters and action—one that permits no compromise and one that demands it. He was succeeding, for he never succumbed to the relentless mores of an anonymous kind of “professionalism” that sacrifices social relations and personal loyalty.

    One day I admired a picture amid the physical trappings of Bhatia’s cherished inspirations. Without hesitation he presented to me the framed portrait of Lawrence of Arabia gazing into one of his own quotations: “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” Indeed, Bhatia had the makings of a most dangerous man.

Internationalist

    Out of a mix of cultures, with intercontinental families and transnational identities, like me Bhatia was hard-wired philosophically, psychologically, and ideologically to be an internationalist. It meant living and working in countless places, taking comfort as an outsider to belong everywhere, and caring deeply about the particular because in it is the universal. Bhatia epitomized the ancient Vedic pronouncement Tat Tvam Asi: That Thou Art—the belief that to damage the other is to damage the self, for they are one and the same. Anywhere I ever went with him he displayed a reflexive instinct to protect.

    Once in East Timor, the militia undertaking the methodical village-by-village destruction of the country set alight a house before us. Automatically, Bhatia disappeared behind a bush, and before I could follow I saw him next with a bucket of water dousing the flames. The exploit was captured by the press, who shot footage beamed around the globe before they too joined other villagers battling the blaze. The compassionate impulse was not without a cost: as we followed a dirt path leading away from the smoldering ashes, the militia confronted us, delivering blows that Bhatia would later dismiss as soft, pudgy slaps.

    On another infamous occasion, during the retreat of the U.N. that promised it would not, 2,000 Timorese who had helped convene a referendum and were targeted, gathered next to the headquarters compound. In the darkness suddenly, tracer bullets were fired into their midst, whizzing streaks of light to add to the terror. In the panic, Bhatia and I knew that the bureaucratic response would be to keep the locals out. I rushed to a blue gate separating the two sides to force it open while blue shirts tried to close it. A few paces away under a high wall topped with razor wire, Bhatia caught children tossed over by their parents and disentangled those dangling in the air. The acts were immortalized by fictional characters in the feature film Answered by Fire, but behind the scenes was the rest of the night spent by Bhatia tending to each of the families, sharing with them food and water and administering first aid.

    Coming to terms with the enormity of desparate situations, we found refuge in the notion of “senseless kindness,” as articulated in Life and Fate, the magnum opus of the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman, who was horrified by the march he covered from the battle of Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin. Senseless acts of kindness toward a soul that may even have done you harm seemed to be the only means of subverting overwhelming evil. In seemingly insignificant gestures incapable of altering the course of events was the very power of a goodness that balanced the odds. Bhatia’s accomplishments aside, without his senseless kindness, we are now in a colder and darker place.

     However long someone lives, a life is ridiculously brief. At the moment of my own father’s death five years ago, I was beset by the feeling that we are here only long enough to be tested, as if in a cosmic laboratory. We cannot seem to alter the circumstances; we can only choose how we behave in them. That choice, though, seems to make all the difference.

Thinker-Actor

    At Brown, Bhatia endeavored to serve at the conceptual and actual frontiers of what might have become an internationalist order. Between the end of the Cold War and the start of another one, he was studying international relations at a historic time of grand experimentation in the business of making peace. In those “inter-war years,” Bhatia actively began his dual career of publishing and operating in the field, the field at that juncture being Western Sahara.

    In his junior year, he organized and accompanied an aid convoy heading from London to the Sahrawi refugee camps in southwestern Algeria. As an intern at the United Nations in Geneva, his proposals for the protection of an entire population during its repatriation—a key feature of the region’s peace plan—were circulated to the negotiators of the process for consideration and adoption. On his return, he addressed the issue before the Fourth Committee of the U.N. General Assembly. Then he wrote about it, in articles and for his senior thesis.

    Bhatia discovered that the peacekeeping field and humanitarian enterprise were concrete paradigms and vehicles for what he had the urge to do. He also recognized that a new type of career path was coming into being. Jobs which had been anomalous deviations from the norm were proliferating and increasingly accessible, and he believed the route to them should be institutionalized for his classmates. He joined a group of pioneers that founded Outposts, a student organization dedicated to direct, individual participation in the international system. Any step forward Bhatia took, he kept open the door behind him for others to follow.

    In May 1999, in my capacity then as director of the Watson Institute’s international relations program, I had the unique honor and special pleasure at a moving ceremony to present Bhatia with his degree and seal with a handshake an eternal bond. On the distinguished grounds of the John Brown House, he was graduating, not only as a Bachelor of Arts but with a well-developed calling.

Peacekeeper

    That summer his baptism under fire was nothing less than the fall of Dili and a conflagration throughout East Timor. It would be a painful hour of trial for us both. He was mostly fearless, but in times of fear, Bhatia proved truly courageous, and this impressed me, however well I knew him. I find that only a few act with benevolence under any set of conditions, just as only a few act always with malevolence; for the majority the distinction depends on how much pressure they are under. Bhatia’s sincerity under the gun put seasoned veterans to shame. Some attributes are not a matter of experience but of fundamental stuff.

    What began as an exercise in election observation—standard enough—ended in the Caesarian birth of a nation. Bhatia experienced for the first time  in a conflict zone: the human dimension of gross suffering, the desperate powerlessness and wrenching dilemmas, the arresting abruptness of being shot at, the gradual death of a bullet-ridden man resisting resuscitation, the sound of singing in churches by people encircled and trapped, the yearning for a moral high ground while bearing witness to the perpetrator, and the yawning questions about the human condition and one’s place in it. Alone in an empty convent, winded after a night spent surrounded by perpetual gunfire, we murmured the title of a book by the Polish war-correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński: Another Day of Life.

    A general evacuation from a town whose inferno was photographed from outer space enabled us to reach Bali, the headquarters of the Indonesian military units implementing a ‘scorched earth’ policy. We walked in past the guards demanding an accounting of what happened to a couple of thousand children we had been forced to leave at the Red Cross compound. Typically, Bhatia, seeing the safe haven getting water-logged from leaking pipes, had begun to shovel dirt and move stones, and small three- and five-year-olds began doing the same, trundling behind him trying to dry the ground. Next dawn they would go missing. Passing through hallways we sought the demon responsible. There in a small room we found him: a duty officer who was in fact Timorese, himself in tears because for days he had not heard from his mother or sister.

    Bhatia had every reason to leave Timor with the gloomiest outlook on his chosen vocation and the creatures that inhabit it. Yet, it was a demonstration of his will that he pieced together his bearings, cared more than ever about anyone in distress, and stayed a course of thinking and acting and seeking to understand why and how. As an honest man of his word, he could still blush and trust.

    While he was in Afghanistan, the post-9/11 wars changed the logic of peacekeeping. The tools of an impartial third party were absorbed by combatants fighting war, and adapted in counterinsurgency and stabilization strategies. The complexity of the new context was of a different order of magnitude, but Bhatia had the best chance of navigating through it at the remotest edge of the front lines.

    Being unable at times to change the world does not mean the world needs to change who you are. I saw Bhatia at the limits of endurance, and he was the personification of a humanitarian and the antithesis of the many unscrupulous officials and fraudulent charlatans who pursue self-advancement under the cover of humanitarianism. Bhatia matured and evolved and adapted down criss-crossing paths of his loves and wars, but he remained true to himself. I will never forget the words of his mother when she broke the news to me: “He wanted to do what he did.”

Jarat Chopra was a Brown faculty member from 1990 to 2007.

This speech was delivered by Alexander Nemser, a 2006 Marshall Scholar, at the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission Annual Dinner on May 12, 2008:



Thank you all for being here—my fellow Marshall scholars, Marshall Sherfield scholars, members of the Marshall Commission, and others. Thank you especially to the Marshall alumni, to whom we are in debt for their contribution to our class’ fundraising project for Darfur.

On behalf of the Marshall class of 2006, I would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Frances Dow, Secretary John Kirkland, and the other members of the Marshall Commission for the privilege and opportunity you have given us to study, converse, engage with bright minds from all four corners of the globe, and  exchange ideas while in the United Kingdom as Marshall scholars. We truly appreciate your generosity and good will. 

Thank you to Mr. Adrian Hodges of the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum for joining us this evening.
I would finally like to thank Mary and Lizzie for all of their work and support.

    I was originally planning to read a heavily ironic speech full of hilarious anecdotes, in which I apologized to Mary and Lizzie for making them feel, through my elusiveness and recurrent absence, like professional hunters of Bigfoot, the legendary North American missing link between man and ape; and in which I told you about the Bodleian Library at Oxford’s unique collection of original Kafka manuscripts—they are not available for vieiwing; and in which I told the story of how I watched from my window in New College, Oxford, as a young man destroyed 20 bicycles and I said and did nothing—when someone asked me, “Why didn’t you call the authorities?” I realized it was because I wanted to watch him do it. Later, I thought to myself, “This must be why Plato kicked the poets out of the Republic.”

    However, after hearing the news of the loss of one of our number, 2001 Marshall Scholar Michael Bhatia, and after reading a bit about Michael’s achievements and character, I felt I could not deliver my funny speech. Instead, I have decided to read a few reflections on our sense of the world’s capacity to be remade, even many times over, and its constant tendency to present us with the unexpected. I will conclude with a poem I wrote while here.

In a pair of hands, in the formation of a planet, and in a particular, shatterable arrangement of objects, the world reveals its multiplicity like an idol turned to show a face on the back of its face.
In the book of Genesis, the world and all that creepeth on it are created twice, destroyed, and remade; and Adam, “the human,” is created twice. Mortally vying for priority of version, the multiple authors of the text left us with a stack of stories, each infuriated and beguiled by the one before it, with all the possible worlds scattering into the margins. “The earth was without form, and void…” The Hebrew for “and void” appears nowhere else in any part of the Bible, except in reference to this initial use, and so the translation is a guess. Maybe it said, “The earth was without form, and sought to possess form.” Ironically, the final redaction, in which the world is made, and then remade, leaves a record of the same impulse of revision felt by God before the flood.
We are left in the end with a feeling of potentiality, a feeling it could have gone another way.

The paradox, as well as the realism, of Shakespeare’s tragedies comes in the sense that while the individual intractable, and terrible and noble for being so, the final devastations at the ends of the plays are the result of surprisingly minor conflicts which, at the moment of their appearance, might have been resolved in the other direction. Thus one character might even seem like an alternate-universe version of another character in the same play, or the result of an alternate path taken by a character in a different play.

The tragedy, however, occurs at the end of possibility, when the individual looks back and sees with the horror of understanding that A went this direction, B went that direction, and now we won’t make it to C, which seemed very close. Coming to his senses at the end of the play, Othello may feel that things began to go wrong even as he was telling Desdemona about another world where there are “hills whose heads touch heaven,” or only when he walked into the room and put out the light.

The dream of traveling in time grips us as much for the wish to redress yesterday’s misstep as for the desire to watch, next to the ram in the thicket, as an angel stops Abraham’s hand.
***

    A utopia picks up where a satire leaves off. The latter, driven by a leveling impulse, chops down the trees of a forest, leaving nothing, while the former responds by using the wood to build a new world. This new world may replace, become, or exist alongside the old one, or do all of those things. The end of the utopia comes when it, too, inspires a satire. 

The known world, scattered with incomplete utopias, nonetheless provides us with elements out of which to form new frames. And in doing so, we open a window onto a world where, under a black sun, Hamlet is Polonius, and our hearts are whole.

As an introduction to my own poem, I will read a selection from Michael Bhatia’s photo-essay on Afghanistan, published in the Globalist.

“Upon our arrival at the USA Gardez PRT, we were subjected to a brief wait by the Afghan guards while our credentials were reviewed. Their guard post was surrounded by potted plants and singing bird cages, the guards only recently rustled from their afternoon naps. Driving away after that generally unsatisfying interview, we turned to see these guards running after the truck.

Worried that we had breached some security protocol, a hand was thrust through the window containing a neatly folded piece of paper. The inscribed Pashtun poem spoke of fleeting glances between man and woman, and of poverty and longing.

The guards then pleaded with Kate [Clark] to deliver the folded note to the BBC in the hopes of it being read over the air. Here is the Afghanistan of poets.”

    As compliment to that poem, which was indeed broadcast on the BBC, I offer one of mine, written during my time in England. It is about how our experience of the infinite is both unexpected and necessary.

To An Astronaut

It was no planetarium:
neither mystery nor commentary,
only a blue encounter with the code.
What little you saw in the cosmos that was yours
lasted only a few seconds,
flashed somewhere at your back,
and was consumed.

At times it seemed a harsh system,
shifting according to its plan,
eluding tabulation,
quivering with the conviction of its orbits.
Mostly it was a wavering display
of senseless iteration,
the backdrop black as the blank eyes of a pharaoh,
asleep in an eternity of access.

At the farthest point,
half-asleep with vertigo,
you saw the green horizon as a circle.
Returning to earth, you found yourself the bearer
of a secret knowledge,
like that shared by two children who have watched,
over an afternoon, the death of a horse.

The colony in space is years away:
you will not live on it.
But Earth is no home for our mutant minds,
which harbor heaven and flee their anchors,
dodging cruel-edged thoughts and floating up
to embrace a looming memory
of troubling and treasured proximity.

A 31-year-old former Medway resident, who was a specialist in the politics and culture of Afghanistan, was killed by a roadside bomb in a remote region of that country along with two US soldiers on Wednesday.

Michael Bhatia, a Brown University graduate and a doctoral candidate at Oxford University in England, had been in Afghanistan since November, helping the Army's 82d Airborne Division to understand the country's tribal customs. He is among a handful of academics who have partnered with the US military in so-called human terrain teams to establish peace in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"He's as much of a hero as any soldier out there," said Steve Fondacaro, program manager for the military's Human Terrain project. "He willingly left a comfortable environment, where he could have continued to be the great scholar he was . . . Michael Bhatia is responsible for hundreds of people being alive today."

Bhatia was considered among his peers to be a scholar's scholar - always on the hunt for that last interview or piece of information that would solve a long-standing dispute in a war-torn area. His family said he made at least eight trips to Afghanistan since his 1995 graduation from Medway High School, and colleagues said he also had been to the volatile areas of the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria, along with East Timor and Kosovo.

During that time, he co-authored two books, including "Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society," which was released last month. In conducting hundreds of interviews with Afghan fighters and other Afghans, Bhatia captured the essence of who they were and the conflicts that entrapped them, in several series of photographs.

Yet with all his success - which also included being a Marshall Scholar and recipient of at least two prestigious fellowships - Bhatia remained humble, said his sister Tricia.

"He was never one to brag about what he was doing," said Tricia, of Medway. "He wanted to talk about you. . . . He had a way of making everyone feel special. He was the glue that brought people together."

She and her parents, Manik and Linda, are heartbroken over his death.

"They took him away too soon," she said. "He had such a passion for life."

The attack took place as a convoy of four military vehicles traveled on a dirt road in a remote region in hopes of brokering peace among two tribes, Fondacaro said. The Humvee, in which Bhatia and four others rode, headed the convoy. The improvised explosive device killed Bhatia and two US soldiers immediately, while critically injuring two other soldiers, Fondacaro said.

A Department of Defense spokesman declined to confirm the details of the attack, including the deaths, citing a military policy of not releasing information until 72 hours after an event.

His death, which became a topic of several blogs in the last two days, shocked colleagues and friends. Up until a year ago, Bhatia was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown.

"He was exuberant, enthusiastic, and full of life, which makes his death all the more difficult to fathom," said James Der Derian, director of the Global Security program at the institute, in a phone interview. "The research he did was exceptional. A lot of people would go to do survey work . . . but he had this unique ability to really listen and see, and that came out in his research and photographs."

Tad Heuer, a roommate at Brown, said Bhatia loved going to war-torn areas.

"I think he really wanted to know how these conflicts began and how to make them stop," Heuer said. "He really saw Afghanistan as a place in the world that hadn't received the attention it should have."

Bhatia's sister said his interest in Afghanistan evolved from a childhood fascination with Russian history. "Everybody knew he was exceptional at an early age," she said. "It's heartbreaking to think that the life he had in front of him is gone."

Montgomery McFate
Senior Social Science Advisor
Human Terrain System
US Army TRADOC

Michael Vinay Bhatia, a 2001 Marshall Scholar, died on May 7 in Afghanistan, where he was working as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department. Michael was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. His dissertation, which was titled The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005, was based on 350 interviews with combatants throughout Afghanistan, as well as archival and media research.

Michael was a great advocate for the poor and disenfranchised in conflict zones around the world. In addition to his extensive work in Afghanistan, Michael's research and humanitarian work took him to such conflict zones as Sahrawi refugee camps, East Timor, and Kosovo. Michael cared deeply about improving the lives of those living in the conflict zones he visited. Michael wrote in November: "The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population's concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan."

Michael's experiences in Afghanistan are perhaps best reflected through his personal photo essay, "Shooting Afghanistan: Beyond the Conflict," which was published by The Globalist in August 2007. The essay can be found online at: http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=6416.

In his essay, Michael reflects his love for Afghanistan:

"...though I have spent the majority of my time there researching the wars and those involved in it, conflict is not my primary memory and way of knowing that country.... I am compelled to write about experiences and ideas that cannot be placed into analytical paradigms, which do not speak to theories of war or peace, to destruction or to reconstruction, but instead to daily interactions that occurred in the course of research.... I feature photographs that are not placed on the front pages of newspapers or books -- but which reflect the pace and constitution of daily life."

Michael had a distinguished academic career beyond his work as a Marshall Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford. He graduated magna cum laude in International Relations from Brown University in 1999. After leaving Brown, he received a Scoville Peace Fellowship in 2000 supporting residence at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, DC. After time at Oxford, Michael returned to Brown as a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007, where he was involved in a research project on Cultural Awareness in the Military, continued to write his doctoral dissertation, and taught a senior seminar on "The US Military: Global Supremacy, Democracy and Citizenship." He has also conducted research in Afghanistan for the Overseas Development Institute, the Small Arms Survey, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the UK Department for International Development (via the International Policy Institute, King's College, London), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

His co-authored book, Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society, was just released by Routledge in April. It assesses small arms and security-related issues in post-9/11 Afghanistan. His edited book, Terrorism and the Politics of Naming, was published by Routledge last September. Stating that names are not objective, the book seeks the truth behind those assigned in such cases as the US hunt for al-Qaeda, Russia's demonization of the Chechens, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of War and Intervention: Issues for Contemporary Peace Operations (Kumarian Press, 2003); and of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global Governance, Review of African Political Economy, The International Journal of Refugee Law, International Peacekeeping, and Middle East Policy. He was the guest editor of The Third World Quarterly Special Issue: "The Politics of Naming: Rebels, Terrorists, Criminals, Bandits and Subversives," which was then released as a book by Routledge.

Michael took inspiration from the renowned war photographer Robert Capa, who was killed in the early years of the war in Vietnam, quoting, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Michael, who was as much at home in Afghanistan as in his native Boston, was always close enough.

Michael's fellow 2001 Marshall Scholars are establishing a Scholarship Fund in his name to fund undergraduates at Brown to undertake independent study travel of the sort that was so important to Michael's life. To donate to this fund, please contact Alan Trammell. For details of services in the US, please contact Jason Wasfy. For details of services in the UK, please contact Paul Domjan. They can all be reached through the Marshall Commission: MACC@acu.ac.uk

Michael Vinay Bhatia ’99 died yesterday [May 7, 2008] in Afghanistan, where he was working as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department.

In addition to graduating magna cum laude in international relations from Brown University, Michael was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007. At the Institute, he was involved in a research project on Cultural Awareness in the Military, writing his PhD dissertation, and teaching a senior seminar on "The US Military: Global Supremacy, Democracy and Citizenship."

Over several years, Michael’s research and humanitarian work took him to such conflict zones as Sahrawi refugee camps, East Timor, and Kosovo, in addition to Afghanistan.

Of his work in Afghanistan, Michael wrote in November: “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population's concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”

Michael had recently published some of his research on Afghanistan.

His co-authored book on Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society was just released by Routledge in April. It assesses small arms and security-related issues in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

His edited book on Terrorism and the Politics of Naming was published by Routledge last September. Stating that names are not objective, the book seeks the truth behind those assigned in such cases as the US hunt for al-Qaeda, Russia’s demonization of the Chechens, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In August, his personal three-part photo essay, “Shooting Afghanistan: Beyond the Conflict,” was published by theGlobalist. In it, he wrote:

“Afghanistan will soon reach a desperate milestone – the thirtieth anniversary of ongoing conflict. … Though I have spent the majority of my time there researching the wars and those involved in it, conflict is not my primary memory and way of knowing it. I am compelled to write about experiences and ideas that cannot be placed into analytical paradigms, which do not speak to theories of war or peace, to destruction or to reconstruction, but instead to daily interactions that occurred in the course of research.”

His love of photography is revealing. In theGlobalist piece, he also wrote:

“Building on Robert Capa’s statement that 'If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough,' James Nachtwey, the preeminent photo-realist and conflict photographer, once indicated that the primary characteristic of a good war photographer was proximity, closeness and involvement.”

Michael was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a George C. Marshall Scholarship in 2001 and a Scoville Peace Fellowship in 2000, supporting residence at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, DC.

He was working on his dissertation, titled “The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005,” based on 350 interviews with combatants throughout Afghanistan, as well as archival and media research. He has also conducted research in Afghanistan for the Overseas Development Institute, the Small Arms Survey, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the UK Department for International Development (via the International Policy Institute, King’s College, London), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Before his fellowship at the Institute, he was a sessional lecturer on the causes of war in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa.

He is the author of War and Intervention: Issues for Contemporary Peace Operations (Kumarian Press, 2003); and of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global Governance, Review of African Political Economy, The International Journal of Refugee Law, International Peacekeeping, and Middle East Policy. He was the guest editor of The Third World Quarterly Special Issue: “The Politics of Naming: Rebels, Terrorists, Criminals, Bandits and Subversives,” which was then released as a book by Routledge. He received his MSc in international relations research from the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

“It's a terrible loss of someone so young, who had already accomplished a great deal, but had so much more to contribute,” said Institute Professor Thomas J. Biersteker, who advised Michael in his studies over the years.

Michael V. Bhatia was no armchair intellectual.

During the first 30 years of his life, the 1999 Brown University graduate had written, coauthored and edited three books, was working on a doctorate degree from Oxford University and had been a visiting fellow last year at The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown.

Still, his friends say, Bhatia refused to rest on his laurels and settle into a comfortable life as an academic. His true passion was traveling abroad and doing research and humanitarian work in war zones such as East Timor, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, [May 7, 2008] a roadside bomb killed Bhatia and two American soldiers in war-torn Afghanistan.

“He thought the best way to make a difference was to go to the field and work with the military,” said Sarah Havens, a 1999 Brown graduate who had remained friends with Bhatia. “He felt it was the only honest way to find out what was happening.”

Bhatia’s family and friends gathered at their home in Medway, Mass., yesterday to grieve and make funeral arrangements. His mother, Linda, said his remains have been shipped to Dover, Del.

“He was my life,” she said. “He was my son. He was a brilliant man. He wanted to do so much good. That’s what he worked for.”

Last September, after completing his fellowship at the Watson Institute, Bhatia left Providence for Afghanistan. There, he was a field social scientist who worked in consultation with the U.S. Defense Department. He spent most of his time imbedded with the Army’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division in southeast Afghanistan.

Bhatia filed reports and took photographs for The Globalist, a daily online magazine. He also served as an adviser and field researcher on local politics, economics, security and tribal dynamics.

In a three-part photo essay published in The Globalist, he wrote, “Afghanistan will soon reach a desperate milestone — the 30th anniversary of ongoing conflict. … Though I have spent the majority of my time researching the war and those involved in it, conflict is not my primary memory and way of knowing it. I am compelled to write about experiences and ideas that cannot be placed into analytical paradigms, which do not speak to theories of war or peace, to destruction or to reconstruction, but instead to daily interactions that occurred in the course of research.”

Those close to Bhatia remembered him as a “brilliant” young man who enjoyed a good time and never exuded a whiff of self-absorbed pretension.

“Not even a little bit,” said Yousra Fazili, another 1999 Brown graduate who majored in international relations. “He was so down to earth. He was really fun.”

Apart from Bhatia’s keen intellect, Fazili, a fellow in Islamic law and gender at Harvard University, has fond memories of Bhatia’s talents as a salsa dancer and having beers with him on College Hill. She described herself as a “cynic,” who frequently debated the “idealistic” Bhatia on foreign affairs.

She remembered that he had a flag of the United Nations posted on the wall of his dormitory room.

“He was just so optimistic about world peace,” she said. “He was just a wonderful person.”

Frederick Melo, another 1999 Brown graduate, had been close friends with Bhatia in college, but they had only occasional contact in recent years.

Melo, a crime reporter at The St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, had fond memories of his former college roommate.

“Brilliant people often have exceedingly sharp edges,” Melo said. “Michael Bhatia was the rare exception. He had heart. He was rarely not smiling, not laughing, not recognizing the beauty in people in the world. I love him and I miss him and I can’t stop crying. The world is such a colder place without him.”

Havens, the former Brown classmate, now works as a lawyer in New York City. Last summer, she traveled to Providence to visit Bhatia. She was impressed to see that he had an office with his nameplate on the door on the same campus where they had been students just eight years earlier.

“We had a lovely time together,” she said. “I was so glad that I made the trip.”

Two months ago, Bhatia sent Havens a package with jewelry and other gifts from Afghanistan. He had planned to return to New England in July to visit family and friends.