About me

Dr. Nafay Choudhury joined the LSE in 2023 and is Assistant Professor of Law (Socio-Legal Studies). His work sits at the intersection of socio-legal studies, legal pluralism, economic development, private law, and the rule of law. He studies the fragmented and plural forms of order that exist within the state, alongside the state, and beyond the state. His current research looks at the role of market associations in providing normative order in fragile settings. His book manuscript (under contract with Cambridge University Press) examines non-state legal ordering through an ethnographic study of Afghanistan’s money exchangers. He is co-editor of the book Frontier Ethnographies: Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Berghahn, 2024). He has conducted extended periods of fieldwork in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and Malaysia.

Previously, Nafay was a British Academy Research Fellow at the LSE Law School and at the University of Oxford, Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine’s College (Oxford), Jeremy Haworth Junior Research Fellow at St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Residential Research Fellow for the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford Law School for the Afghanistan Legal Education Project, concurrently serving as Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul where he helped launch the country’s first English-medium law program. He has held visiting fellowships at the South Asia Centre at the University of Tokyo and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. Nafay completed a PhD in law (King’s College London) as an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholar and also holds a JD/BCL (McGill), MA (Queen’s, Canada) in economics, and BA (McGill) in economics.

Nafay’s writing has been awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize, the Asian Law & Society Association Distinguished Article Award, the Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Law and Society Association, and the Trandafir Writing Competition Award from the Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems journal. Nafay is an avid home cook and proudly grew up in Cape Breton (Canada), which he still considers home.

Socio-legal studies
Legal pluralism
Private governance
Law and informality
Economic development
Rule of law
Critical legal studies
Social theory
Law and political economy
Legal anthropology
Ethnography
Decolonial studies
Fragile settings

LL202: Commercial Contracts

Frontier Ethnographies: Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024) (co-edited with A Schmeding)

Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how—faced with frontiers—they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.

click here for publisher's site

'Introduction' in: Choudhury, N & Schmeding, A (eds.) Frontier Ethnographies: Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024) pg. 1-29 (with A Schmeding)
'Strategies of Survival: Navigating Kabul’s Money Bazaars' in Choudhury, N & Schmeding, A (eds.) Frontier Ethnographies: Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024) pg. 31-50
'“I Am Not Alone”: Rohingya Women Negotiating Home and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Refugee Camps' In: Mayer, T. and Tran, T. (eds.), Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power (New York: Routledge 2022) (with F Rahman)
“Transacting on Trust: The Regulation of Trade Credit by Afghanistan’s Money Exchangers” (2022) Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, 32, pp. 341-372
“Order in the Bazaar: The Transformation of Nonstate Law in Afghanistan’s Premier Money Exchange Market” (2022) Law and Social Inquiry, 47 (1), pp. 292 – 330
“The Regulation of Informal Trade Credit (Ograyi) in Afghanistan” (2021) Asian Journal of Law and Society, p. 1-29
“Lessons on Global Legal Transfers from Afghan Taxi Drivers: A Social Network Approach” (2019) Journal of Afghan Legal Studies, vol. 2
“Revisiting Critical Legal Pluralism: Normative Contestations in the Afghan Courtroom” (2017), Asian Journal of Law and Society, 4, pg. 229-255
“The Localised Madrasa in Afghanistan: Their Political and Governance Entanglements” (2017), Religion, State & Society, 45:2, pg. 120-140
“Pluralism in Legal Education at the American University of Afghanistan” (2014) Suffolk Transnational Law Review, 37, pg. 249-288
“Niqab vs. Quebec: Negotiating Minority Rights within Quebec Identity” (2012) The University of Western Ontario Journal of Legal Studies, 1, pg. 1-29

“Power, Inequality, and Local Land Conflict in Afghanistan: A Study of Kabul's Peri-Urban Areas” (2019). Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Electoral Reform and the Experience of Parliamentary Elections in Afghanistan” (co-authored) (2018) Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Promoting Women’s Economic Participation in Afghanistan through Legal, Regulatory & Policy Reform” (December 2015). International Center for Afghan Women’s Economic Development at the American University of Afghanistan