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This book maps out how political networks and centres of power, engaged in patronage, corruption, and illegality, effectively constituted the Afghan state, often with the complicity of the U.S.-led military intervention and the internationally directed statebuilding project. It argues that politics and statehood in Afghanistan, in particular in the last two decades, including the ultimate collapse of the government in August 2021, are best understood in terms of the dynamics of internal political networks, through which warlords and patronage networks came to capture and control key sectors within the state and economy, including mining, banking, and illicit drugs as well as elections and po...
This edited volume provides new insight into the interplay between governance and conflict. The articles in this volume deal with this problematic dimension from a variety of perspectives, covering different actors and topics as well as a vast array of geographical locations and entities that include both states and de facto or unrecognized states such as Transnistria. Scholars and practitioners have contributed to this worrk to bridge the gap between academia and practice. The volume blends scholarly research with examples of practical application to approach the conundrums of governance in and during conflict in a comprehensive way.
This book offers an overview of the formation of the Afghan state and of the politics, economic challenges and international relations of contemporary Afghanistan. It opens with an account of some of the key features that make Afghanistan unique and proceeds to discuss how the Afghan state acquired a distinctive character as a rentier state. In addition, the authors outline a complex range of domestic and external factors that led to the breakdown of the state, and how that breakdown gave rise to a set of challenges with which Afghan political and social actors have been struggling to deal since the 2001 international intervention that overthrew the anti-modernist Taliban regime. It then pre...
The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. Yet, while corrosive, these problems were not in themselves sufficient to have brought about a collapse. To a significant degree, they were the result of early failings in institutional design, reflecting an American inclination to pursue short-term policy approaches that created perverse incentives-thus interfering with the long-term objective of stability. This book exposes the true factors underpinning Kabul's fall. The Afghan Republic came under relentless attack from Taliban insurgents who depended critically on Pakistani support. It also suffered a creeping invasion that put the government on the back foot as the US tried and failed to deal with Pakistan's perfidy. The fatal blow came when bored US leaders naively cut an exit deal with the enemy, fatally compromising the operation of the Afghan army and air force and triggering the final collapse, with top leaders at odds over whether to make a final stand in Kabul. The Afghan Republic did not simply decline and fall. It was betrayed.
The Afghanistan report was published by USAK in cooperation with the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabancı University, and sponsored by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division.
This book, by one of the most experienced authorities on the subject, presents a deep analysis of the very difficult current situation in Afghanistan. Covering a wide range of important subjects including state-building, democracy, war, the rule of law, and international relations, the book draws out two overarching key factors: the way in which the prevailing neopatrimonial political order has become entrenched, making it very difficult for any other political order to take root; and the hostile region in which Afghanistan is located, especially the way in which an ongoing ‘creeping invasion’ from Pakistani territory has compromised the aspirations of both the Afghan government and its international backers to move the country to a more stable position.
Introduction : the impact of four decades of war and violence on afghan society and political culture / Nazif Shahrani -- Technologies of power-competing discourses on national identity, statehood, and state stability -- Afghanistan : a turbulent state in transition / Amin Saikal -- Afghanistan's "traditional" Islam in transition : the deep roots of Taliban extremism / Bashir Ahmad Ansari -- Language, poetry, and identity in Afghanistan : poetic texts, changing contexts / Mohammad Omar Sharifi -- Lineages of the urban state : locating continuity and change in post-2001 Kabul / Khalid Homayun Nadiri and M. Farshid Alemi Hakimyar -- Webs and spiders : four decades of violence, intervention, an...
This volume is a collection of some of the key essays by Ramesh Thakur on the origins, implementation and future prospects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm. The book offers a comprehensive yet accessible review of the origins, evolution, advances and shortcomings of the R2P principle. A literature review is followed by an overview of the background, meaning and development of R2P. With a focus on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), Part I analyses the features of, and explains the factors that make for success and failure of commission diplomacy. Part II discusses the controversies surrounding efforts to implement R2P, including the role and importance of emerging powers. Part III describes the remaining protection gaps and explains why R2P will remain relevant because it is essentially demand driven. Finally, the book concludes with a look back at the origins of R2P and looks ahead to possible future directions. This book will be essential for students of the Responsibility to Protect, and of much interest to students of global governance, human rights, international law and international relations.
Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways...
This book covers the period spanning the international invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the foreign military withdrawal in 2014. It explores and dissects the conflictual encounter between international troops, statebuilders and donors on the one hand, and Afghan elites and the wider population on the other. It brings together a group of leading experts and analysts on Afghanistan who examine the varied reasons behind the mixed and often perverse effects of exogenous state-building and reflects upon their implications for wider theory and practice. The starting point of the various contributions is a serious engagement with empirical realities, drawing upon extended experience and field research. Their exploration of the unfolding dynamics and effects of external intervention raise fundamental questions about the core premises underlying the state-building project. This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.