Postdoc’s path to peace and justice research has been a journey // News // Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies // University of Notre Dame

Helal KhanHis path to becoming an anthropologist researching peace and justice has taken him around the world.

In his home country of Bangladesh, Khan was an army officer stationed along the border with Myanmar. He served as a United Nations peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the historic 2006 elections – the first free elections in more than forty years. Khan’s academic career included graduate studies and teaching positions in the United Kingdom, Belgium and the United States.

“In my mind I was always a peacemaker, but it took this trip for me to get into anthropology and peace and justice studies,” says Khan, who earned his doctorate. in peace studies and anthropology from Notre Dame in 2023 and is now a postdoctoral educator at the Center for Social Concerns.

The spark for Khan’s journey came from encounters he had with Rohingya refugees while serving in the Bangladesh Border Guard more than 15 years ago. He watched as members of the Muslim minority group fled persecution in Myanmar and crossed the border into Bangladesh in large numbers. The UN Human Rights Council’s largest Rohingya refugee camps were in the area for which Khan was responsible as a major in the border guard.

“The Rohingya talked to me about their persecution, but more than that, they talked about the hope they had for the future,” he said. “That’s very interesting because perhaps the first impression is that this is the most persecuted community in the world. That’s actually a term the United Nations used to describe the Rohingya.”

Khan began to consider anthropological questions. How do people survive injustice and continue to thrive? How do they maintain their culture when they move to a dramatically different place? What impact do immigrants have on their new communities?

Khan left Bangladesh in 2015 to study at the University of Edinburgh, where he received a prestigious Chevening Scholarship from the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office and obtained a master’s degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. He subsequently received a Flanders Master Mind Scholarship to study at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he obtained a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology with a research focus on Muslim immigrants in Brussels.

He received a Notre Dame Presidential Fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. at Notre Dame, which gave him the opportunity to study at both the Department of Anthropology and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

His move to the American Midwest also brought him close to three growing Rohingya communities in Chicago, Milwaukee and Fort Wayne. His dissertation was on the well-being of these communities, focusing on the concepts of trust and hope.

“I got my Ph.D. in the West, but I have worked with people who came from elsewhere,” Khan said. “At the end of the day, my Ph.D. became a study in cultural interaction – how people from Chicago, Milwaukee and Fort Wayne interact with the Rohingya as much as how the Rohingya interact with them.”

Khan was a member of the Center for Social Concerns’ first cohort of Graduate Justice Fellows in 2022-2023, the final year of his Ph.D. program. He then returned to the Center as a postdoctoral educational scholar for the 2023-2024 academic year.

This semester he is teaching a course, Everyday Justice, which uses an anthropological perspective to introduce students to the cultural contexts of justice that speak to people’s everyday experiences. The course encourages students to look at how issues of justice in education, health care, employment, the environment, and other areas affect people on an individual level and how those individual experiences relate to larger policy questions.

“I believe anthropologists are uniquely positioned to draw connections between this humanistic discipline and bring us closer to understanding contemporary societies through the lenses of peace and justice,” Khan said. “You can study people and also study the environment at the same time and see how much of it is fair and how much is not.”

Another project he completed at the Center for Social Concerns is the Community Engagement Case Archive. The archive will be a collection of observed real-life scenarios about students’ relationships with new people, dealing with differences and dealing with ethical dilemmas, among other challenges. The goal of the project is to improve students’ preparation for working in places and communities that are new to them.

“Students will be able to read these stories, reflect on the situations and learn from them before settling into a new community and facing different forms of justice and injustice – individual and institutional,” Khan said.

After this academic year ends, Khan will transfer from Notre Dame to a faculty position at Georgetown University’s Justice & Peace Studies Program.

“That’s where I am now: soldier turned peacekeeper, anthropologist turned lover of peace and justice,” Khan said. “Peace is worthless if it is not just.”

Originally published at socialconcerns.nd.edu.