The Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University (ACKU), formerly the ACBAR Resource and Information Centre (ARIC), as envisioned by Professor Louis Dupree, was established in Peshawar (Pakistan) in 1989. Professor Louis Dupree often stated that his ambition was to understand Afghanistan “from one cell up” and during the 1970s, the Dupree home in Kabul was filled with Afghan and inter national scholars and students exchanging knowledge and ideas.

During the war years, Louis gained new insights while traveling across the border from Peshawar; meanwhile, Nancy Hatch Dupree kept track of happenings among the world’s largest refugee
population. Here was history in the making, a crucial component of Afghan heritage that desperately needed to be recorded. Louis then launched the idea of a resource centre that would preserve information from a wide variety of sources on every aspect of this traumatic period.

Following Professor Louis’s death in 1989,Nancy picked up the reins. In 2005, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, then Chancellor of the Kabul University, provided temporary space in the University’s Main Library. In 2007, President Karzai authorized development funds to be made available from the Government’s budget for the construction of a new facility at the University Campus. In 2007, the Dupree Foundation was established in New York to support the program in Afghanistan.

On 27 March 2013 ACKU inaugurated the new building, located at the center of the Kabul University Campus. The new facility is funded largely by the Afghan government with some contributions from foreign donations. A new memorandum of understanding was signed with the Ministry of Higher Education in January 2013 providing for ACKU to operate independently inside
the University Campus.