Michael Vinay Bhatia was born in 1976 in Upland, California. He graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 1999 taking his degree magna cum laude with honors in International Relations. He received the Scoville Peace and Disarmament Fellowship and a British Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford. There he received his masters from the Department of Politics and International Relations in 2002. He served as a visiting fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and was a lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He died in Khost, Afghanistan in 2008 while serving as a social sciences consultant or academic embed for the United States Defense Department. He received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Defense of Freedom posthumously.
Bhatia's carefully directed his academic career to prepare him to participate in finding solutions for the problems in the hot spots of the world especially the Middle East. He served as an intern in the summer of 1998 with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In the spring of 1998, he worked as a research assistant at the Watson Institute at Brown compiling a data base of 2,200 peacekeeping sources. From 1996 to 1998 he worked on a study with Prof. Thomas Weiss on the effectiveness of military-humanitarian intervention in Northern Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti. Bhatia took part in the Saharawan Aid Trust's humanitarian aid convoy in the fall of 1997 and he took that semester in the study abroad program in London at the School for Oriental and African Studies. He did research for the Overseas Development Institute, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the United Kingdom Department for International Development, The Small Arms Survey, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He also did research in East Timor in 1999, Kosovo in 2000 and 2002 and the Western Sahara in 1998 and again in 2001 and made shorter field research trips to Bosnia and the Israel/Occupied territory as well.
Bhatia's written work also focused on conflict resolution. His senior honors thesis at Brown was on the Western Sahara region : Repatriation under a peace process : the case of the Western Sahara. He edited a volume entitled War and intervention : issues for contemporary peace operations which was published in 2003 and co-authored : Afghanistan, arms and conflict, armed groups, disarmament and security in a post-war society which appeared in 2008. He published articles in the periodicals Global Governance, Review of African Political Economy, The International Journal of Refugee Law, International Peacekeeping and Middle East Policy and guest edited a special issue of The Third World Quarterly with the separate title : The politics of names : rebels, terrorists, criminals, bandits, and subversives. This later appeared in book form under the title : Terrorism and the politics of naming. At the time of his death, Bhatia had nearly completed his dissertation : The mujahideen : a study of combatant motives in Afghanistan 1978-2004. This was based on the 345 interviews with combatants Bhatia conducted throughout Afghanistan as well as media and archival research. At the time of his death in Khost, he was helping to resolve intertribal conflicts on land rights as part of a pilot Human Terrain System (HTS) program. These programs assign 5-8 social scientists such as anthropologists, historians or sociologists to work closely with trained military personnel as well as the local populace to find solutions to local problems. It is estimated that these HTS units help save hundreds of civilian lives.
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Michael V. Bhatia papers, Ms. 2010.003, Brown University Library.
Michael Vinay Bhatia's life was dedicated to conflict resolution. From the time he entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, he focused his studies on the causes of war, the achievement of peace, and the just treatment of refugees. His papers, all of which reflect the academic bent of his life, fall logically into the following series : correspondence, notebooks, school papers, material which is related to his dissertation , research files, maps, and posters.
The correspondence is housed in two folders. One contains letters on the details surrounding Bhatia's participation in a caravan to the Western Sahara in the fall of 1997. The other folder contains the rest of his extent correspondence which dates from 1998 through 2008 and includes a letter of congratulations from Senator Edward Kennedy.
There are thirty notebooks, most of which are undated. One contains what appear to be lessons in Farsi with URLs for online Farsi tutorials. Another is in a completely different hand and is labeled Dr. Jamil. Large sections of this are written in Arabic characters. There are several notebooks which appear to contain class notes along with bibliographical references, meeting times and dates, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. The rest of the notebooks contain similar materials but instead of class notes, there are notes from what appear to be military briefing sessions. These also include the questions and answers from many but not all of the 345 interviews Bhatia conducted with Afghan combatants. These interviews in turn became the basis of his dissertation. The next series is made up of draft and final copies of several of the chapters from Bhatia's dissertation. There are also typed compilations of notes he took when doing research for his dissertation and transcriptions of the combatant interviews, the originals of which are in the notebooks series.
The school papers series contains the usual detritus of an academic career. Included are exam blue books from classes at Brown University, term papers for classes at Brown University and for a master's degree at Oxford, syllabi from a wide range of academic institutions, an incomplete application for Bhatia's concentration declaration in International Relations at Brown, a photograph of Bhatia with Vartan Gregorian, president of Brown University 1989-1997, a draft of Bhatia's application for a British Marshall/Rhodes scholarship and the accompanying letters of recommendation, several copies of the George Street Journal with an article on and a photograph of a presentation by Bhatia., thanks from the Human Resources staff at Brown for a class Bhatia gave at a Staff Development Day and a small caricature of himself drawn by Bhatia during Russian class.
The research files make up the bulk of the Bhatia papers. These are largely photocopies of articles and chapters from books on the causes of war, the Western Sahara, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, refugees, and the history of Afghanistan. The bulk are in English but there are a few articles and periodicals in various Middle Eastern languages.
The maps compliment the research files and focus largely on the Western Sahara and Afghanistan. One large map of the Western Sahara has been created by taping together smaller maps and has some town names marked in purple or green.
The posters are from the 2004 elections in Afghanistan.
The collection is organized into following 7 series:
The collection was given to Brown University as a gift by Mr. Bhati'a mother in 2009.
Brown University Library catalog record for this collection: