ALPA Board of Advisors Chooses A Chair with Deep Roots in Afghan Academic Development

On January 9, 2026, after a thoughtful conversation and a powerful statement of interest, the Board elected Alice Stokke as the new Chair of the Advisory Board. Before the election.

Alice has a long history of involvement with legal education support in Afghanistan. She co-led the University of Washington’s Legal Education Support Program for Afghanistan, known as LESPA, which she helped build from the first grant proposal in 2004 all the way through the conclusion of the program in 2020. For almost a decade, from 2011 to 2020, she served as co director of LESPA. Those years covered political shifts, security crises, and constant uncertainty, yet the work continued. That alone tells you something about her persistence and her understanding of Afghan higher education. For an organization like ALPA, which has grown faster in ideas and commitment than in resources, that experience is not simply impressive, it is essential.

Alice spoke with clarity about why ALPA matters. She described ALPA’s wide reaching programs as critically important for the education of Afghan women and for the encouragement and support of Afghan scholarship wherever Afghans now live. She recalled attending the October ALPA conference and being struck by the quality and diversity of the participants, from young students to experienced scholars, from those inside Afghanistan to those in the diaspora. For her, that gathering was a sign that the intellectual future of Afghanistan is not lost, only displaced and reshaped.

The January meeting was also a continuation of a larger institutional conversation: ALPA Council, a gathering of ALPA Directors and Advisors. In December 2025, the ALPA Council met and brought together directors from different divisions. At that council meeting, they reported on what their divisions had achieved in 2025 and laid out their objectives for 2026.

The story from the divisions was encouraging. The ALPA College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has made enormous progress. What began as a set of scattered online classes has started to look and feel like a real college. There is now a developing diploma program that gives students a coherent academic path in law, politics, and the broader liberal arts. There is also a student information system, the SIS, where ALPA College students have their own accounts. From those accounts they can see which courses they have completed, how many credits they have earned, and how they are progressing toward their goals. For many Afghan students who lost access to formal universities, the simple act of logging in and seeing their academic history recorded and respected is deeply meaningful. It says, quietly but firmly, that their learning is real.

The Research Excellence Lab has also moved beyond the stage of intention. Directors described projects that range across constitutional design, conflict and peace, migration, gender, and political economy. They spoke about Afghan research assistants who are reading, writing, collecting data, and presenting their work in spaces where Afghan voices are often missing. The Lab is becoming a home for young scholars who might otherwise have drifted away from academic life under the pressure of exile, economic need, or discouragement. In this sense, the Lab is not only producing research papers, it is protecting an intellectual generation.

Alongside this, the Reimagining Afghanistan Forums have become a kind of independent public square. In these forums, Afghans and their allies think together about the future of governance, rights, inclusion, and justice. They are not official negotiations, and they are not party platforms. They are spaces where people can ask serious questions without fear of silencing by the state, and without the pressure to provide quick and optimistic answers. The Board discussion touched on how to preserve the recordings, how to turn some of the conversations into written outputs, and how to connect them to teaching, research, and advocacy.

ALPA Publications represent another front where ideas produced in this community reach outward. The year 2025 brought clear achievements. The ALPA Annual Conference gathered an impressive range of speakers and participants, and it left behind a set of papers and discussions that can feed into future work. The launch of the ALPA Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies marked another step, giving scholars a place to publish serious work that speaks across law, politics, history, sociology, and related fields. Together with reports, edited collections, and blogs, these publications are slowly building a record of Afghan thinking about Afghanistan at a time when official institutions often try to erase or narrow that thinking.

As the January 9 meeting drew to a close, there was no denial of the harsh reality outside the screen. The year 2025 had been a grim one in the world. Afghan women remain excluded from public education inside the country. Many former students and professors are scattered across continents, often struggling with basic needs, immigration status, and daily stress. The global environment for democracy and human rights has grown darker. Yet inside this meeting, there was also a sense of quiet determination. ALPA now has clearer structures, from the College to the Research Lab, from the Forums to Publications. It now has a Board of Advisors that is not symbolic but active, with a Chair whose entire professional life has been intertwined with Afghan legal education.

It is easy to speak of hope in abstract terms. What this meeting showed is that hope can also take the very concrete form of a student information system that works, a journal issue that is published, a forum that runs on time, a research assistant who gets their first footnote in print, and an experienced grant writer who is willing to help secure the next five or ten years of work. On January 9, 2026, ALPA did not solve the crisis of Afghan education. But it did something important. It chose leadership, it reviewed its own progress with honesty, and it committed itself to another year of building small but real institutions for Afghan learning. In times like these, that is no small achievement.