Dr. Zakia Adeli is the President and Founder of PAN-AF. A political scientist and senior policy practitioner with more than fifteen years of experience spanning academic research, high-level government service, and international civil society, she holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Tarbiat Modares University, Iran (2013).
From 2018 to August 2021, Dr. Adeli served as Afghanistan’s Deputy Minister of Justice for Social Affairs, overseeing six departments — Political Parties, Civil Society Organizations, Human Rights, Legal Aid, Real Estate, and Gender. She created and led the technical committees on Political Parties and on Civil Society Organizations, respectively, directing the drafting of the revised Political Parties Law and Civil Society Organizations Law through to Cabinet approval, and she directed the design and implementation of a nationwide database registering and monitoring roughly 5,000 civil society organizations and 76 political parties. She directed the consolidation of Afghanistan’s periodic human rights reporting to the UN Human Rights Council and treaty bodies, including CEDAW, and served as a member of several senior government commissions, among them the High Commission for Rule of Law and Governance, the High Commission for Human Rights, and the High Commission for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Between 2020 and 2021, she also served on the Leadership Board of the Afghan Red Crescent Society, where she played a key role in revising and reforming its charter. In 2020, Adeli was a member of the Afghan government’s official peace negotiating delegation to Doha, Qatar, engaging directly with Taliban representatives on the framework, agenda, and confidence-building measures for inter-Afghan negotiations, and she subsequently served on the Presidium of two Supreme National Peace Council commissions — Political Parties and Civil Society, and Women and Human Rights.
Dr. Adeli served as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Kateb University from 2013 to 2017, and subsequently as a professor at Kabul University and Chair of its Research Committee for Law and Political Science Studies from 2017 to 2021, teaching international relations theories, foreign policy; diplomacy and diplomatic relations; politics in developing countries; comparative political systems; international organizations; and conflict and peace studies. She supervised more than 300 master’s dissertations. She also is the author of three books and numerous peer-reviewed articles on post-colonial politics, Afghanistan’s constitutional law, human rights, foreign policy, and regional security.
Dr. Adeli has served as a Research Fellow at the East-West Center (2022–2026), where she conducted research on politics and human rights in South Asia, served as an advisor and mentor in the Center’s leadership and training programs, and led the Education for Afghanistan project as Principal Investigator. In 2025, as a Scholar Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, she conducted research on the Afghan diaspora’s electronic participation in democracy, through which she designed the Network Civic Convergent (NCC) model — an active participatory framework that today forms the founding basis of PAN-AF itself, connecting Afghan professionals and academics worldwide through digital participation for Afghanistan’s better future.
Recent Publications:
“The Consequences of Taliban Policies on Human Rights.” Asia Pacific Issues, No. 162, East-West Center, February 2024 (peer-reviewed).
“The Taliban’s Return Has Robbed Afghanistan’s Women and Girls of Their Future.” East-West Wire, August 2022. Link: https://www.eastwestcenter.org/news/east-west-wire/the-taliban-s-return-has-robbed-afghanistan-s-women-and-girls-their