May 9, 2008—Social scientist Michael Bhatia ’99, a civilian member of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Team, was killed on Wednesday, May 7, in eastern Afghanistan. The Human Terrain Team has been a controversial experiment by the U.S. Army in which, according to an account by David Rohde ’90 in the New York Times, civilian social scientists accompany U.S. military units and advise them on the subtleties of local culture, often allowing soldiers to learn about ongoing local disputes sometimes exploited by the Taliban. Although details of Bhatia's death remain sketchy, one blogger in the region is reporting that Bhatia died with two soldiers from the blast of an improvised explosive device. Two other soldiers were also reported to be seriously injured.

Bhatia, a magna cum laude international relations concentrator at Brown, had just published his second book, Afghanistan, Arms, and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament, and Security in a Post-War Society, in April. While at Brown, he was a Marshall Scholar and served as an intern with the UN High Commission for Refugees in Saharan Africa. Since graduating, he has been a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, a graduate student at Oxford, and has worked for a number of nongovernmental organizations in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and East Timor.

Read a remembrance by a former Watson Institute teacher and colleague here.