About the author(s):
Sabawoon Samim is a contributing author to the Armed Groups and International Law blog.
Ashley Jackson
Dr. Ashley Jackson is the author of “Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan” (Hurst & Co./OUP, 2021), co-director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups and an Associate Researcher with the Conflict, Security and Development Research Group at King's College London. Her research focuses on engagement with armed groups, and she has written on these and related issues for Foreign Policy, NY Times, Washington Post, and others. She holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
Dr Florian Weigand is Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups and a Research Associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on conflict zones, borderlands and other complex environments, how they function and are governed. Florian is the author of 'Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan' (Columbia University Press, 2022) and 'Conflict and Transnational Crime: Borders, Bullets & Business in Southeast Asia' (Edward Elgar, 2020). He also is the co-editor of the 'Routledge Handbook of Smuggling' (Routledge, 2021).
This post forms part of phase two of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, hosted by the Armed Groups and International Law blog. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address both civilian harm and humanitarian need.
Much conflict research begins with a set of necessary questions: what happened, where, when, by whom, and why? These questions help us to identify patterns of violence, assess humanitarian need, understand drivers of conflict, or hold parties to conflict accountable.
But for civilians, harm rarely ends when an incident ends. A raid, arrest, school closure, displacement, checkpoint, family death, aid exclusion, or loss of livelihood can redirect the course of a life. These experiences can shape where someone lives, whom they depend on, whether their children go to school, how they move, what work they can do, whether they trust authorities, and what futures they believe are still possible.
This is why life history analysis matters – and why exploring life histories through interviews helps us to go beyond what other qualitative or quantitative methods can cover. For researchers, understanding a person’s life trajectory offers a way to see civilian experiences of conflict as lived and evolving trajectories. Seeing the whole picture helps reveal how harm accumulates, how need changes, how people navigate shifting authorities, and how protection is sought, improvised, denied, or negotiated over time.
In this blog we explain why we chose this method for the Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC)’s research on harm + need in Afghanistan because it offers a more holistic way of understanding how people’s lives have unfolded across decades of war, intervention, insurgency, displacement, economic crisis, aid dependence and disruption, and the return of Taliban rule.
Life history analysis
Life history analysis is a qualitative method that reconstructs a person’s life trajectory over time. It pays attention to chronology, turning points, relationships, constraints, strategies, encounters with authority, and how people make sense of what has happened to them. It is different from most other interview-based research methods because it prioritises understanding trajectories over events. The analysis is also different from more structured approaches that often rely on coding, where interviews are broken into categories such as “displacement,” “livelihoods,” “violence,” or “aid access.” Those themes are important, but life history analysis enables engaging with more complex questions focused on sequencing and interrelation: how do these experiences unfold together across the course of a life?
A life history interview may show, for example, how a security incident led to a person’s displacement, which led to the loss of land or work, which led to debt, which changed marriage or family obligations, which affected children’s education, and ultimately altered how the respondent related to authorities or aid providers. None of these effects can be fully understood in isolation.
Life history analysis also foregrounds turning points. These may be dramatic, such as fleeing violence, losing a family member, being detained, or being forced from school. They may also be less pronounced, such as a shift in who controls a district, the closure of an office, the loss of a salary, a change in household responsibility, or a conversation with an authority figure that changes what someone thinks is possible.
Life history analysis in Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a particularly important context for life history analysis because many civilians have lived through multiple systems of rule and repeated war and political rupture. A single life may span the Soviet occupation, civil war, Taliban rule in the 1990s, the post-2001 Islamic Republic, international military intervention, insurgency, displacement, the withdrawal of international forces, the collapse of the Republic, the return of the Taliban, economic contraction, and the restructuring of international aid. For younger Afghans, many came of age during the Republic, with particular expectations around education, employment, mobility, public life, and international engagement. The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 changed the terms on which they could imagine their future.
Life history analysis helps capture these different layers. A woman’s access to work, for example, may depend on household negotiations, Taliban rules, local officials’ discretion, transport costs, documentation, fear of harassment, the availability of aid, family reputation, and the shifting moral economy of what is considered acceptable. A man’s livelihood decisions may be shaped by debt, drought, mobility restrictions, family obligations, and the risk of being associated with one side or another.
Life stories as a way of seeing harm + need as trajectories
The Consortium’s work centres on a harm + need approach and explores how compliance and restraint, alongside other legal and extra-legal strategies, might contribute to full(er) protection in war. Its conceptual framework explicitly seeks to broaden the material, personal, temporal, and spatial scope of harm + need so that analysis better reflects everyday lived realities of conflict. The BCC framework is useful here because it asks researchers to examine harm + need more broadly than conventional categories such as ‘civilian harm’ or ‘humanitarian need’ often allow.
Life history analysis is particularly well suited to tracing the trajectories of harm and need. It allows researchers to trace harm as a process rather than an event and explore how it can reorganise and reorient a person’s life. A killing, detention, threat, or military operation may be the initial rupture. But its effects of that rupture may reverberate into the future. It may produce displacement, debt, family separation, interrupted schooling, loss of assets, chronic fear, stigma, dependency on relatives, or exposure to exploitative forms of work. Likewise, a household’s needs may change as conflict dynamics shift, aid is withdrawn, markets contract, rules on women’s work change, family members migrate, or social networks weaken. What begins as a need for food or shelter may become a need for documentation, debt relief, legal assistance, psychosocial support, livelihood support, or protection from coercion and stigma.
Life stories as a way of capturing experiences beyond harm and need
Life histories also help correct a common bias and weakness in conflict analysis: the tendency to describe civilians’ experiences mainly in terms of what they suffer or lack (i.e. harm and need). But civilian experiences are much more complicated and multidimensional, of course. For example, they are also constantly making decisions under pressure. At the same time, it is important not to romanticise these strategies. “Agency” under conditions of conflict is often constrained and morally complicated. A family may keep a daughter at home to reduce risk, while also limiting her education and future opportunities. A person may comply with an authority not because they support it, but because refusal would be dangerous. A household may move to escape one harm and encounter another. Silence may protect someone in the short term while deepening isolation or fear.
Life history analysis is useful precisely because it can hold space for these tensions and seeming contradictions. It allows civilians to appear as people navigating impossible choices within unequal systems of power.
Better methods, better questions
Life history analysis does not replace incident tracking, legal analysis, survey research, humanitarian needs assessments, or political economy analysis. Instead, life histories reveal how harm and protection unfold and are experienced across time.
In Afghanistan, this temporal depth is essential. The lived effects of conflict, governance, aid, and social restriction cannot be understood in fragments. A method that follows trajectories can help researchers ask better questions: enquiring not only what harm occurred, but what it set in motion; not only what needs exist, but how they were produced; not only whether civilians are protected, but how they seek protection themselves; not only whether armed actors comply, but when and why they exercise restraint; not only whether interventions reach people, but whether they change the conditions of their lives.
This is the value of life history analysis for Afghanistan and for the BCC’s wider research agenda. It helps connect the intimate and the structural, and shows that civilian harm is lived biographically, not only incident by incident. In doing so, it brings us closer to understanding what fuller protection might require in practice.