Noah Coburn is Professor of Anthropology at Bennington College. He is the author of Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town (Stanford, 2011) and Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan: Elections in an Unstable Political Landscape (2014) with Anna Larson. He has been conducting ethnographic research in Afghanistan since 2005, as well as working for the United States Institute of Peace, Chatham House and the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit and as an election observer.