Search

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Badakhshan, a borderland province in the northeast of Afghanistan, the paper explores the role that opium poppy cultivation has played in a marginal high-altitude economy. Framed by the analytic of 'narco-frontiers' and the puzzle of the persistence of small farmers in uneven agrarian transitions, the paper investigates the diversity of market and non-market institutions that operate across the means of production of opium. Rather than seeing opium poppy production as the vanguard of an agrarian transition, it is suggested that it is more of a rearguard action to ensure survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses peace education focusing on how place-based experiences and collective memories stimulate local mobilisation for refugees fleeing from war. The Arctic Migration Route, located above 69th degree north, became an alternative to dangerous boat trips on the Mediterranean Sea, for people seeking safety and protection in the fall of 2015. During a few months, over 5,500 people from 35 nations, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran came to a municipality in north Norway with 10,000 inhabitants. The paper demonstrates how global conflicts far away, have important local consequences across borders and huge distances. Interviews with local authorities, teachers, voluntary workers constitute the main empirical material. By combining theories of place-based experiences and collective memories with phenomenology of practice, geographical location, collective and cultural memories across generations, are analysed as important driving forces for the local mobilization to help refugees. This approach opens for a wider perspective on learning, showing how climate, culture and history have important role as material and sociocultural education in this arctic border region in the north of Norway. Based on empirical data from a small local school, the paper will document how a local community can find solutions to globally produced problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stand-alone price analysis of illicit opium and coca does not explain why smallholders turn to illicit crops for coping and survival. Under conditions of precarity, illicit crop markets can stimulate productivity. They generate returns that can tame crises and relieve pressures. To smallholders facing marginalisation, violence, and climate change – growing opium and coca, despite their illegality, can reduce or spread risks and provide more predictability. Thus, rather than fix on the 'invisible hand' of price theory, the focus should be on the 'visible hand' of political entrepreneurship, interdependent relationships, and the metrics of precarity. To do this, this paper retrospectively compares illicit crop prices before and after certain historical moments in Bolivia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the critical hydropolitics literature by introducing the power–interests–identity nexus framework and addresses how it shapes decisions and (re)actions to transform or maintain water conflicts. The framework is investigated using the Helmand/Hirmand river basin, shared by Afghanistan and Iran. It elucidates which factors led to the transformation of Iran–Afghanistan water conflicts and the signing of the 1973 Treaty, as well as the influential factors that have contributed to its maintenance in the 2020s. The results demonstrate using the framework provides comprehensive insight by identifying the influential latent factors of transboundary water arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the remapping of the American landscape as a mass reproducible visual medium onto foreign territories - particularly Afghanistan - during the Cold War. A series of films produced by the US Bureau of Mines and later screened in these territories are the sites of analysis. These films were the source material that applied the American landscape in its many forms, climates and uses to the US's physical infrastructure projects during the time. As sights, these projects of infrastructure building are indicative of the colonial gaze US technicians used to reproduce these landscapes and their underlying systems of power and class around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the making of Bamiyan Buddhas beyond the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan since 2002. Recounting the building and rebuilding of a monastic complex in Bangkok, the study focuses on one of these new Buddhas, more complete than the "original" Bamiyan Buddha of the dually inscribed grotto, "Bamiyanguha-Bamiyan Museum", at Wat Saket. In their global manifestations, the Bamiyan Buddhas have emerged as mobile sites, as place holders with direct and indirect citations to the destroyed Buddhas of the valley. The building of Wat Saket's Bamiyan Buddha is situated within larger transnational histories of planned, projected, rejected, and reproduced Bamiyan Buddhas, within stylistic decisions related to questions of shifting material media, scale, and iconography involved in copying and reproductions, in the context of Thailand's changing engagements with itinerance, multiplication, and copying strategies around Buddha images, and in national and global circuits of collecting, exhibitions, gift, and piety. The museum, specifically the cave-museum of Wat Saket, as a site of retinal and haptic vision which continues to challenge and blur the distinctions between curatorial visions, specialist pedagogy, visual instructions, aesthetic contemplation, and rapidly shifting and evolving complex of ritual practices and leisure, remains at the heart of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses critical discourse analysis and critical literacy to analyze the first in a series of literacy primers developed with US support for children in Afghanistan in the 1980s, called 'Jihad literacy'. The text is analyzed for its ideological content as related to the themes of religion, violence, and martyrdom in the historical perspective of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The paper demonstrates how the notion of 'Jihad' was subverted to promote a holy war against the Soviet invasion. The educational system supported by the US created a radical version of Islam based on violence and martyrdom, shaping the Afghan society to this day. We contend that the same or similar institutions shape current discourses as in the past and that children are the main victims of politico-economic warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the utility of critical realism as an ontological foundation for the analysis of education policy in emergencies. By exploring the synergy between critical realism and a method to analyse policy known as Critical Policy Analysis, the paper argues for the use of conceptual analytical tools when examining education policy in conflict-affected contexts. It illustrates the value of theory-informed analysis by reflecting on a recent study of Afghanistan's higher education strategic planning, and advocates for critical engagement with broader cultural, political, and economic factors in the analysis of education policies during conflicts and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even in intense combat scenarios, a significant proportion of a soldier's time is spent passing the time. Tim Hetherington was acutely aware of this contradiction; of the 240 pages of Infidel, his account of the time he spent in Combat Outpost Restrepo in the remote Afghan Korengal valley, only about one sixth show soldiers actually in combat. The remaining pages depict soldiers maintaining their base, passing the time playing cards, wrestling each other, and sleeping. This focus on the lacunary moments between skirmishes and contacts marks out the work as attuned to a more complex understanding of the nature of soldiering in front line situations. This paper situates Hetherington's work into a longer historical engagement with the depiction of soldiers 'killing time' between moments of combat, and in the context of how the homosocial nature of the proximity in which soldiers live and work contributes to their combat motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terror encountered by women in Afghanistan because of the military withdrawal of United States and its allies in the summer of 2021 is ongoing. The first part of this paper describes emergency clinical interventions provided to two young university Kabul women wishing to escape the Taliban. The second part of this paper explores ideas about moral injury and this psychologist-psychoanalyst's motives for focusing on the survival of the two women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health, conflict/war, Social Determinants of Health (SDHs) and Global Health Diplomacy (GHD) are believed to be strongly interwoven. Afghanistan that is known as the 'Graveyard of the Empire' has been passing through a very critical phase given the prolonged civil war during the last couple of decades, wherein the ongoing current situation further pushed the country towards the collapse of the political and economic systems. Thereby, Afghanistan's healthcare system has been entrapped into the civil war conundrum causing the SDHs to be seriously affected. Conflict in any form, i.e. local, regional, or international, has left black swan impacts on not only the SDHs but also led to health crises given the inaccessibility, unaffordability, and more of lack of the infrastructure, and exodus of trained medical staff and healthcare inequity. In this situation, it is anticipated that GHD could play a significant role in providing equitable healthcare to people at stake. Against this backdrop, the focus of this paper is; how the SDHs have been impacted by the civil conflict and how the public healthcare has been turned into a conundrum; would the GHD resolve the healthcare crisis in the prevailing scenario? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature of fiscal federalism suggests two approaches to explaining the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. First, a normative approach that considers governments as benevolent social planners pursuing normative criteria of efficiency and equity; and second, a public choice approach assuming governments as self-maximizing actors who use intergovernmental transfers to purchase political capital, enhancing their chances of re-election. This paper seeks to test the hypotheses of these two approaches to explain the allocation of discretionary development budget among Afghan provinces during three fiscal years of 2016–17, 2017–18 and 2018–19. Findings indicate Afghanistan's central government's approach does not focus to achieve normative criteria of improved participation, predictability, transparency, and equity. Instead, Its central government considers certain political criteria such as political affiliation – ethnic affiliation and alignment with central government policies – political importance, and strength and weakness of local actors. This paper relies on both quantitative and qualitative data to support its arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable focus on the widespread destruction of cultural heritage in Afghanistan since the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001 and much concern over the future for heritage in the region on the return of a Taliban regime in 2021, yet comparatively little has been written on the fate of Afghanistan's national collection of paintings, manuscripts, and works on paper. Through a quasi-experimental study and using a combination of evaluation methodologies, this paper discusses whether the overall impact achieved in conservation capacity-building and training schemes in conflict zones justify the cost and risk of operating in such regions. Using an international collaborative conservation training course carried out in 2020 at the Afghan National Gallery in Kabul as a case study, it discusses the appropriateness and effectiveness of the signature pedagogies in conservation when working in a conflict scenario, and highlights the limitations present in conservation training programmes in post-conflict scenarios and the need for sustainability of such programmes. The results of the study found that common constructivist-focused, Eurocentric conservation pedagogies may not be effective for training museum professionals in regions where this approach is unfamiliar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite record economic growth in the decade that followed the fall of the Taliban regime, poverty remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, declining substantially only in regions that suffered more from conflict. This paper aims to explain this apparent puzzle by combining conflict-related indicators at the province level with household level observations. Estimates, which start in 2007 and stop in 2014 because of data availability constraints, show that large troop deployments reduced conflict intensity but also boosted local consumption, an effect reinforced by foreign aid flows being larger in conflict-affected areas. The robustness of these findings is assessed through an out-of-sample simulation of the impact of declining international troops and foreign aid after 2014. The simulation accurately predicts the sharp deterioration in living standards uncovered by a 2016 household survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, a Pakistan spy chief told journalists in Kabul: 'don't worry, everything will be okay' in Afghanistan. What is interesting to note in this assertion is that Pakistan had consistently been accused of playing a 'double game' in the war on terror since 2001. This paper examines the return of the Taliban and Pakistan's role in their victory in August-2021. In particular, it addresses the following questions: Why are Pakistan-Afghanistan relations so fraught? What is the pattern of Pakistan's influence over the Afghan Taliban? How different is the post- 2021 Taliban regime from its Taliban predecessors (1996–2001)? What might the long-term implications of the Taliban victory be for Pakistan? This paper employs the security-cum-rentier state framework to explain Pakistan's double game in the war on terror. Moreover, this paper aims to situate and contextualize the situation in Afghanistan (2001–2021) in the ongoing geopolitical rivalry, i.e. Quad/ Indo-Pacific Strategy (West) versus the Belt and Road Initiative (China). Methodologically, this study is based on secondary sources and some primary sources (official documents). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence scholars routinely portray intelligence oversight as a means of restraining intelligence activities, particularly covert operations. The consensus overlooks situations where oversight can instead channel popular passions. This paper documents how Reagan era activists recruited legislators to the Afghan resistance cause. Their legislative-civic alliance demanded the CIA launch more aggressive operations in Afghanistan, sidelining established oversight committees. The resulting covert action campaign risked Soviet escalation, eliminated plausible deniability, and gave advanced U.S. technology to potential terrorists. This episode highlights how well-organized lobbyists may affect the intelligence agenda and challenges assumptions that wider engagement in oversight will always restrain intelligence agencies' overreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) commenced in October 2001, the U.S. Special Forces (SF) were the first U.S. military unit on the ground in Afghanistan, utilising their Unconventional Warfare (UW) capabilities. Despite their significant role at the initial stage of the military campaign, SF began to encounter numerous challenges from as early as 2002 and throughout OEF. Based on an analysis of forty-five master's theses authored by SF officers, this paper discusses the structural-organisational and cultural-conceptual challenges. These obstacles led to the marginalisation of SF's UW efforts. Scholarship on special operations forces (SOF) often regards the period of the so-called global war on terrorism (GWOT) as U.S. SOF's golden age focusing predominantly on the activities of SOF units linked to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command rather than on SF. By examining the challenges faced by SF, this article aims to contribute to a more nuanced discussion of SOF efforts during GWOT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Located at the intersection of feminist geographies of development and embodiment, this paper explores the everyday gendered experiences of international women staff working for an education-related NGO in Afghanistan. Drawing from a larger study, this paper is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight international women who have spent extended periods of time working in Afghanistan. It reveals the various ways international staff experienced and managed their western female bodies within and across public, non-work related spaces. Our analysis focuses on the participants' ethical and cultural considerations of covering, navigation of gendered eye contact, and experiences of sexual harassment in the streets of Kabul. It reveals how women's embodied experiences within and across non-working spaces of development led to (partial) knowledge, heightened reflexivity, critique of the development industry, and deep questioning about identity politics. Ultimately, this paper offers valuable insights into the corporeality of international women in public spaces in Afghanistan. It highlights the importance of non-work related spaces for cultivating women's understandings of difference, relationality, and ethical relationships with the Afghan women they work for and with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on understanding how displaced people perceive dignity. In doing so, empirical evidence from the displaced Rohingyas from Myanmar, now living in Bangladeshi camps, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Afghanistan are contrasted with how dignity is being conceptualised in existing social science literature. In most traditional models or theories of dignity, one's lived experience is absent, ignored or presumed by the theorist. This paper demonstrates that the common and traditional approaches that ignore the importance, experience and perception of dignity (and loss of it) from the perspective of the 'victim' group are, in effect, engaging in an act of denial – imposing the view and perspective of the powerful on the experience of the vulnerable, denying their voice. Rohingyas in Bangladesh and IDPs in Afghanistan are presented as two interesting case studies in understanding and revisiting existing conceptualisations of dignity through a bottom-up approach. Arguments presented in this paper enable us to view dignity through the lens of the affected, vulnerable and victimised people. It is argued that, for effective and sustainable resolutions for these vulnerable groups, such a view can inform national, regional and international policymakers, allowing them to become conscious of dignity from the perspective of the displaced people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a global research sweep of terrorist organizations' (as well as other non-state actors such as separatist and insurgent groups) use of fresh water as a target, weapon, or source of control, this paper analyzes attacks on major water projects (specifically dams and other related infrastructure) in South Asia—the region identified to have had the largest number of recorded water-related violent incidents. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and the post 9/11 period through 2019, the paper explores how large water infrastructures (and their environs) have become hot spots for violence between states that use water development projects to consolidate power, garner local loyalty, and create a national narrative and non-state actors who attempt to target these same projects to assert indigenous self-determination, subvert state power, or challenge state authority through terrorist means. Since fresh water is shared across borders, dam projects can become entangled in regional political disputes further exacerbating violent conflict between state and non-state actors. Given its impacts on water resources, climate change may act as a "threat multiplier" by enhancing local grievances, providing both government and terrorist groups additional incentives for exploitation, and further contributing to instability. The analysis provided here borrows from and contributes to the fields of development, environment and security, and terrorism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur C. Danto's distinction between monuments and memorials proposes a differentiation between two ideologically-determined modes of commemoration, encompassing not just architectural symbols of the past but also all other forms of cultural 'remembering', including documentary, literary, and cinematic forms of representation. My discussion will focus on a photographic album significantly entitled The Last Good War and the transhistorical depictions of the war veteran in the film Memorial Day. The purpose of this paper is to underscore the ideological ambivalences at the heart of the American Second World War veteran 'craze', which not only paved the way for overriding the post-Vietnam War cultural legacy, but also served to ethically and ideologically legitimize contemporary US military interventions in national (collective) memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how affective forecasting errors (A.F.E.s), the difference between anticipated emotion and the emotion actually experienced, may induce changes in preferences on time, risk and occupation after combat. Building on psychological theories incorporating the role of emotion in decision-making, we designed a before-and-after-mission survey for Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. Our hypothesis of an effect from A.F.E.s is tested by controlling for other mechanisms that may also change preferences: immediate emotion, trauma effect – proxied by post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) – and changes in wealth and risk perception. At the aggregate level, results show stable preferences before and after mission. We find positive A.F.E.s for all three emotions studied (fear, anxiety and excitement), with anticipated emotions stronger than those actually experienced. We provide evidence that positive A.F.E.s regarding fear significantly increase risk tolerance and impatience, while positive A.F.E.s regarding excitement strengthen the will to stay in the military. Trauma has no impact on these preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wakhan, northeast Afghanistan's peripheral panhandle, is situated between Afghanistan's borders with Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. Once subject of Great Game rivalry, it requires multiagency fieldwork to better understand its geopolitical vulnerabilities. Existing accounts of Wakhan are deemed inadequate and inappropriate, exceptionalising its wildness and wilderness, and drawing (in)civility distinctions that legitimise a near-divine right to dominion. Reassessing Wakhan in a boundary biography, the paper argues that by conceiving boundaries as local manifestations of international dynamics, marginal boundary regions can serve as tests for the 'state' of international affairs. The paper firstly assesses evolving understandings of boundaries before conceiving them as local manifestations of international dynamics. Existing narratives are then observed to render the region subaltern. Wakhan is thereafter rethought in a boundary biography revealing how marginal boundary regions are malleable instruments of statecraft. Wakhan is observed, in the assessment, to continuously reflect the changing 'state' of international affairs. Such reassessment rids Wakhan of its 'wild' otherness, transitioning it from untaken virgin land to a vulnerable periphery, forced to adapt to exogenous change. Rethought in this way, Wakhan constitutes a local site of international contestation, a demonstration that place at the margin has the potential to be concurrently local and international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in 'Aidland' studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in the return of rejected asylum seekers, irregular migrants, and refugees, we do not know enough about how geopolitics affects returns governance. This article addresses this knowledge gap by analysing the case of Turkey, exploring how positions in the global migration regime and relations with countries of origin influence return policies. It first argues that Turkey's geopolitical reasoning has led it to design an asylum regime, including repatriation and deportation procedures, centred on temporariness. Second, it contends that Turkey's extraterritorial space-making strategies – namely, military intervention in Syria and humanitarian/development projects in Afghanistan – guide return policies. Examining the Turkish case contributes to our understanding of national returns governance in transit-turned-host countries, which increasingly emphasise repatriation over long-term protection. Finally, the paper contributes more generally to our understanding of the geopolitics of returns by focusing on specific mechanisms that link geopolitical concerns with policy instruments at the state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North-West Frontier of British India, a semi-independent mountainous borderland, was the site of continuous Pukhtun armed struggle against colonial intrusion throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth. Persistent tribal armed attacks and major rebellions were followed by 'butcher and bolt' or 'burn and scuttle' British military expeditions, including one of the biggest Victorian small wars–the Tirah Campaign of 1897/98. Two features are particularly distinctive about the Pukhtun insurgencies: 1) The fierce and consistent nature of Pukhtun opposition to the encroaching British military state; 2) The insurgents' success in warding off annexation and inflicting decisive military defeat time and time again propelled the colonial state into an ongoing reflexive about its failure to 'pacify' the region and control the tribes. Focusing on Afridi insurgency in the nineteenth century, this article examines some themes that draw attention to causes, grievances, and toward the insurgent actors. While our fleeting glimpses into insurgents motives and actions come largely from colonial accounts of counter-insurgency operations, by drawing on my extensive archival and field research in the North-West Frontier, including Afridi oral testimonies, this paper focuses its lens on the Pukhtun perspective of the North-West Frontier 'small wars'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates, by means of computer-assisted qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, how and when ideology was securitized in US presidential speech. It reveals how securitizing speech justifies methods and targets in the resistance of "dangerous ideologies" that are problematic for democracies. The analysis reveals that the entanglement of oppositional ideologies with security was articulated in the context of the War on Terror. While the original need to see ideologies as an existential threat was necessary to justify the exclusion of the ideologies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2004 and 2005 respectively, the securitization of ideologies then spread to issue areas beyond terror and to geographic contexts outside of these two countries, all the way to US domestic political competition. The need to avoid embarrassment in Iraq and Afghanistan may have thus affected US democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid climate change is impacting water resources in Afghanistan. The consequences are poorly known. Suitable mitigation and adaptation strategies have not been developed. Thus, this paper summarizes current status of knowledge in relation to Afghan water resources. More than 130 scientific articles, reports and data sources are synthesized to review the potential impacts of climate change on the cryosphere, streamflow, groundwater and hydrological extremes. The available information suggests that Afghanistan is currently witnessing significant increases in temperature, less so precipitation. There is evidence of shifts in the intra-annual distribution of streamflow, with reduced summer flows in non-glaciated basins and increased winter and spring streamflow. However, in the short-term there will be an increase in summer ice melt in glaciated basins, a "glacial subsidy", which sustains summer streamflow, despite reduced snow accumulation. The future prognosis for water resources is likely to be more serious when this glacier subsidy ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that part-time adult literacy facilitators (ALFs), who are often employed in large numbers, have the potential to become agents for a wider approach to development, especially through involvement with the adult learning targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Drawing on international ethnographic-style research into adult literacy facilitators in Africa and elsewhere, the paper reports the findings of a project examining in depth the profiles of six adult literacy facilitators in Afghanistan. The paper identifies the diversity of experiences they bring to their teaching and their potential for national development goals, and draws some lessons about the training and support systems required to help them become more effective in their teaching. It attempts to provide insights into ALFs in Afghanistan which will be of interest to the international community of academics and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan came under the international spotlight following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.Mainly due to being a semi-autonomous region where British-colonial-era laws were practised until May 2018, FATA remains one of the most marginalised and insecure areas of Pakistan. Based on Galtung's structural violence theory, this paper examines the nexus between the region's socio-economic and political realities and terrorism. Through primary and secondary data, this paper argues that economic marginalisation and the lack of political and individual freedom of the tribal people are root causes of the instability in FATA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 14 April 1923, an attack upon the bungalow of Major Ellis in Kohat on India's North-West Frontier, resulted in the murder of Mrs Ellis and the abduction of their seventeenyear-old daughter, Mollie. Led by Ajab Khan Afridi, the abductors, fled into the independent territory of the Tirah Jowaki. The North-West Frontier represented a contested and strategically sensitive frontier open to both Russian encroachment and the machinations of the Amir of Afghanistan, whilst the Pathan tribal inhabitants were simultaneously characterised as 'savages' and independent warriors. Mollie Ellis's abduction brought into sharp relief the governance and security of the region that pivoted on John Loader Maffey as Chief Commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province. Using the hitherto unpublished collection of papers and letters from Maffey to his wife, Dorothy Gladys Huggins, an assessment of the political, strategic and financial limits of British power through the lens of the man on the ground will be possible. In the final assessment, the abduction of Mollie Ellis demonstrated that Britain's existence on this strategically sensitive frontier rested upon an uneasy coexistence between the Afghan Amir, the Frontier tribes and the limits of imperial endurance in both Delhi and London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing studies on illicit drug economies in violent contexts are typically concerned with whether illicit drugs are a driver of insecurity, or vice versa. This paper provides additional nuance to the literature by considering the interaction between different governance arrangements and the everyday life of people involved in the drug economy. Drawing from a systems-lifeworlds approach, we present evidence from interviews and life histories collected in four district case studies in two borderland provinces of Afghanistan. We find that governance in government-controlled areas tends to be more fragmented, negatively affecting the livelihoods of small-scale drug producers and traders. However, we also find exceptions to this trend, where stable governance arrangements emerged under state control. While authority tends to be less fragmented in Taliban-controlled districts, illicit drug producers fared much worse under Daesh rule, showing stark variation in the effects of insurgency rule on the drug economy. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that participants in the illicit drug economies thrive in ungoverned environments, our findings show that there is considerable, if selective, demand for predictable rule-based political authority, albeit pragmatic enough to allow an open-access illicit drug economy to operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of suitability within applications of Ideal Distribution Models (IDMs). Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of single measures of suitability in contexts where diverse local populations practised a range of subsistence strategies with different environmental requirements and sociocultural consequences. To do so, we draw on legacy survey data from northern Afghanistan, within the historic region of Bactria. This region of Central Asia has a rich history of nomadic pastoralism as well as dense urban settlement, with these two lifeways often occurring concurrently with complex social and economic interdependencies developing between pastoral and agricultural societies. Conceptually, we predict that such diversity should be difficult to model by conventional IDMs, as what may be defined as a low ranked habitat by one definition of suitability may be highly ranked in another. On the other hand, identifying strong deviations from IDMs may in fact indicate shifts in subsistence strategies and settlement patterns occurring across various periods of sociopolitical and cultural change. Based on our analysis, we conclude that single measures of suitability do not sufficiently model settlement patterns as predicted by IDMs but do in fact help highlight long-term processes of ecological engineering and inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an under-researched area of India's security relations with nations in West Asia. Counter Terrorism (CT) Cooperation between India and the Gulf nations has strengthened remarkably over the past five years after a prolonged period of limited cooperation on this critical issue. This paper explores why this has occurred. It argues that geopolitical factors associated with India's rise, associated shifts in economic interests, and the changing security landscape in the Middle East and Afghanistan account for this new cooperation. It also discusses the impact of the Modi administration in altering the dynamics of India's relationship with the two Gulf nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost a decade, Afghanistan has been largely off the mainstream global discursive agenda. In this context, Joshua Partlow's recent tome A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster is an exception. However, Partlow, who served as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Kabul, offers a delineation grounded in what Edward Said describes as Orientalism. Offering a discourse analysis of Partlow's title as a case study, this paper argues that the Washing Post scribe has portrayed Afghanistan—in line with Orientalist approach—as an unchanging polity. Exoticizing the country at times, Partlow presents Afghanistan as a brutal and inhuman space where practices are grounded in tribal customs instead of rationality. Moreover, Partlow's representation of Afghanistan is aimed at audiences in the Occident. Judging Partlow's representation of Afghanistan against facts, this paper also demonstrates the inaccuracies in Partlow's narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a first view on the potential economic outcomes for American women serving along-side men in combat roles. Specifically, this paper examines the impact of deployment and exposure to intense combat for women who served in the most high-risk occupations open to them in Iraq and Afghanistan on their subsequent use of GI bill benefits for higher education. It also compares these women to men who served in the same capacities and women who served in lower risk occupations. Women in general, and in these occupations in particular, were more likely than their male counterparts to use the GI bill. Following deployment, this paper presents robust evidence that women in all capacities, and men, were more likely to use their GI bill benefits. Moreover, exposure to intense combat, which was far more likely to impact these women than other women, detracted from their propensity to use the GI bill. This negative impact on pursuit of higher education was similar for both men and women. Taken together, this paper provides evidence that deployment may benefit the young men and women alike who serve in the U.S. military, and that both suffer together when faced with exposure to intense fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan appears to exist in a different time from 'us.' Modernization theory, linear narratives of progress, teleological tales of growth and common sense stories of development seem to have met their match when it comes to this landlocked country. This paper considers the ubiquitous construction of Afghanistan as the 'Graveyard of Empires' to explore the ways in which representation, memory-making, and an allegory of mythic import perform a constitutive function and help suture an otherwise disjointed history of Afghanistan. Conducting a sustained inquiry into the political valence of the Graveyard trope, the paper reveals that it is especially ill-chosen on three counts. (i) It is ahistorical, relying on a selective evocation of history. Related to this ahistoricism, it sets up the past as the 'key' to understanding the Afghan present. On this account, another future is not possible. (ii) It is geographically or at least 'physically' deterministic: Afghanistan is constructed as a land of unconquerable terrain, its topography menacing and ultimately unassailable. Not only does this present the physical environment as an immutable entity, it also feeds into representations of Afghans as rugged warriors, bred to be weathered and connately austere. (iii) It is racialized: Afghans as inhabitants, creators and living relics of this graveyard are constructed as inured to hardship, belligerent and always already girded for combat. Thus the 'graveyard of empires' becomes a politically charged trope that is engaged in a continual re-inscription of the Afghan population as an alien other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the last part of Afghanistan to be converted to Islam (in 1896), Nuristan retains a distinct material and intangible cultural heritage. However, for nearly forty years, Nuristan has been virtually inaccessible to researchers of cultural heritage due to protracted insecurity in the province. With the Taliban in control of the country once more, conflict has largely ceased, enabling access to many hitherto inaccessible parts of the country, including Nuristan. There is now a window of opportunity to conduct much-needed work on the state of cultural assets across the province. The authors conducted two separate field visits between May and July 2022 to undertake a preliminary assessment of Nuristan's intangible and intangible cultural heritage and to conduct a feasibility study for future mapping and conservation efforts. This paper presents initial findings from the fieldwork and highlights the urgent need for investing in cultural protection work in Nuristan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following its independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistan inherited territorial disputes with Afghanistan and India. The conflicts over the Durand Line demarcation and Pashtunistan became guiding factors in Afghanistan's opposition to Pakistan's membership of the United Nations. Since then, relations have been more conflictual than cooperative. The nature of the bilateral relationship has been overshadowed by mutual mistrust, despite the two nations' cultural links and Pakistan being home to the world's largest number of Afghan refugees. This article employs trust theory to explain why the two states continue to have less cooperative, more conflictual relations. Based on the analysis, this paper accepts that bilateral interactions between the two states are dominated more by the long legacy of mistrust than by a perceived need for cooperation, but argues that they act more "rationally" when they interact with each other in negotiations involving other countries (e.g., trustworthy hegemons), whether in connection with trade or security matters. This article argues that the manifestations of strategic trust in multi-party negotiations are largely due to the fear of losing enormous economic and geopolitical benefits from other actors, such as China and India, in case of non-cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan was among the lowest ranking countries worldwide in the United Nations Development Programme 2018 Gender Inequality Index, ranking 168 out of 189. Amnesty International, Afghanistan's Ministry of Women's Affairs and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission have all reported a rise in gender-based violence against women by both State and non-State actors. Afghanistan is party to several international human rights instruments, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, under which the State is obligated to eradicate all types of discrimination, violence and other potential detrimental practices against women. Moreover, under the due diligence standard, States are urged to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and, in accordance with national legislation, punish acts of violence against women. This paper addresses the issue whether Afghanistan has met its international obligations to eliminate violence against women using the due diligence standard. It identifies the dismal shape of the current regulatory, institutional and policy frameworks concerning the elimination of violence against women in Afghanistan. This article concludes that Afghanistan has failed to protect women, potentially leading to a breach of its obligations under international law and proposes certain recommendation to improve the plight of Afghan women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how a national higher education sector can be assembled upon a relatively narrow ideological foundation during and in the aftermath of violent conflict. It analyses the case of Afghanistan's higher education system, and argues that the violent disintegration of this system during the 1980s and 1990s created the conditions for a neoliberal reassembly and subsequent expansion of higher education from 2001. This paper draws on data gathered from document analysis, and semi-structured interviews with key policy actors. It identifies an ideological grounding in neoliberalism within higher education policies which are responsible for directing the sector's growth since 2010. I argue that this neoliberal agenda, largely driven by globalised influences, has exploited Afghanistan's conflict-affected context to position higher education primarily as a driver of economic growth, thus limiting policy emphasis on higher education's non-economic dividends. The paper concludes by critiquing the underlying assumption that this role is sufficient if higher education is to serve as a key institution in Afghanistan's ongoing national development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show the relevance and applicability of Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach (MNCA) in feminism to the lives of the women in Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) regions who are impacted by war, underdevelopment, entrenched patriarchy and religious fundamentalism and face its deadly repercussions on their daily lives and human rights. Contrary to the reductionist representation of women in these regions in terms of their religio-cultural identity, this article bases itself in their harsh, socio-economic-political reality, history of the cold war, erosion of democratic institutions, war on terror and the rise of militarism and nationalism. Thus, issues of development, specifically, gender gap and human rights need to be brought centre-stage to address the systematic violation of women's rights. The MNCA, being rooted in the dignity and personhood of each individual, is an indispensable baseline in terms of basic human rights for women in the Af-Pak region. Here, I show how the MNCA does not contradict institutions of family, culture and religion in the region and actually serves to build a bridge between universality and the specific local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the US failed to implement the WPS Act and offers a practical demonstration of how to analyze Afghanistan's security situation from a WPS lens before making three policy arguments regarding what the United States can learn from this error. This omission from the ongoing political debate demonstrates that - despite the United States in the late 2010s being "the first country in the world with a comprehensive law on WPS, and I de facto i , the first with a whole-of-government strategy that responds to such a domestic law"[1] - its government and security communities have not yet fully integrated critical WPS concepts and theories or understood their practical applicability for US security and policy decisions. The US military withdrawal process from Afghanistan brought politicized accusations of multiple foreign policy - military, intelligence, and diplomatic - miscommunications and misconceptions. WPS analyses are critical to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly WPS analyses are critical if policymakers and security professionals truly wish to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly and what the United States should consider for future drawdowns. [Extracted from the article]

This paper concerns young adults who came to Sweden from Afghanistan as unaccompanied refugee minors (UMs) and their engagement with poetry and other creative activities. The aim was to explore how UMs use poetic writing and other creative activities to handle resettlement challenges. Seven young men and six young women, aged 18–24, participated in semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed using the three components of poetry therapy, developed by Mazza. Three themes were identified: (1) Encouragement; (2) Creative expressions as a "safe place"; and (3) A sense of recognition. Through creative expressions, our participants could understand and handle the emotional difficulties and the insecurity associated with resettlement. Poetic writing was a way to convey personal experiences of injustices, a source of self-understanding, and a way to establish new social networks. We discuss and present suggestions on how poetry and other creative activities can be integrated in interventions toward UMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, homecoming is an encounter with an unrecognisable former homeland that has become a place of uncertainty and confounding moral landscapes. Within the liminal space of combat deployment, occupying soldiers cross thresholds which confound established moral worlds and problematise notions of purpose. Through acts of transgression, temporality and ratiocination are challenged and reconfigured. Applying the analytic of 'thresholds' to theorise about these encounters, this paper draws from 18 months of fieldwork with repatriated American veterans as well as my own experience as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As a concept, thresholds elucidate the intensity and permanence of the embodied phenomenological encounters that epitomise contemporary wartime soldiering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump vowed to bring troops home from Afghanistan. After the election, in August of 2017, newly elected President Trump, with advice from national security adviser McMaster, decided to keep troops in Afghanistan. It is reported that the President was convinced to keep troops in Afghanistan after shown a black and white photograph of Afghan women in miniskirts from the 1970s (Eberhardt, 2017; Rucker & Costa, 2017). These photographs, in juxtaposition with images of veiled women, however, play a specific role in how we think about Afghanistan and intervention. Examining media representations of Afghan women, we explore media coverage in The New York Times, through a thematic analysis of 286 articles beginning with the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 up to 2018. We focus on coverage of Afghan women over the span of 17 years, paying close attention to news coverage following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, President Obama's direction to increase the number of military troops in the country, and President Trump's decision to keep troops in Afghanistan. This paper examines how Afghan women are presented in media coverage and how these representations contribute to larger discussions of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan for more than a decade, with territorial gains by coalition forces often proving to be ephemeral. This paper traces the origins and evolution of the current Afghan insurgency and explores the framing of the Taliban movement's discourse on Twitter and other interactive websites. The paper postulates that Taliban activists are utilizing social media to disseminate their views and frame their movement in the phraseology of militant Islamism, traditional Pashtun folklore, anti-imperialism, social justice, and universal human rights. Taliban militants are attempting to align their discursive frames with various transnational ideologies that resonate not only with prospective recruits and supporters in Central and South Asia and the Middle East, but also potentially receptive audiences in the West. Such frame alignments are essential components in the micro-mobilization of movement participants. Taliban activists apparently recognize that there are important symbols, narratives, and channels already in existence that can facilitate the growth of their insurgency, while effectively discrediting coalition forces. This paper examines frame alignments and other insurgent-mobilization communication strategies by conducting a content analysis of recent tweets and blogs written by Taliban cyber-activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the period 2001–2003, the paper discusses how the Western military intervention in Afghanistan changed power structures early on, undermining the political settlement in the long term and culminating in the present electoral crisis. Key concepts, a theoretical framework and the initial military approach (including how the initial military strategy undermined an indigenous solution for toppling the Taliban) are outlined and literature focused on hybrid governance and ‘legitimacy’ as an important but overlooked facet of peace-building is presented. Examples of ‘lessons learned’ in relation to the failure to engage with traditional forms of governance–early on in the Afghan conflict—are set out. The objective is to show that the military strategy adopted in 2001–2002 had adverse long-term consequences that were hard to reverse later on (e.g. by shifting the goalposts of military activity to, for example, a counter-insurgency strategy from 2005 onwards). This paper does not aim to resolve these paradoxes in the Afghan context going forward but offers implicit recommendations based on ‘lessons learned’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]