The State-Building Dilemma in Afghanistan

After nearly two decades of war, on February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban through which the US and its NATO allies’ troops must leave Afghanistan within the following few months. This agreement also paves the ground for Intra-Afghan talks between the US backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban militant group. This book critically reviews the US/NATO military, peace-and-statebuilding intervention since 2001 in Afghanistan. In addition, based on collected field interviews, it presents the Afghan perception and discourse on the topics such as democracy, Islam, women rights, formal and informal governance, ethnic divide and the state democratic governmental design at the national and subnational level.

“Islam as Cement”: The Way Out?

Chapter 2 scrutinizes the contours of the Muslim unity project. Through interview data it demonstrates how the belief in “Islam as cement” comes to life in the discourses of several religious elites who characterize Sunni Islam as an overarching supranational identity and see Muslim fraternity as the only solution to the Kurdish conflict. Citing certain hadiths and verses from the Qur’an, they reproduce the belief that Sunni Islam could indeed bridge the ethnic divide between Kurds and Turks. To provide some historical context, the chapter goes on to analyze this discourse in relation to the Muslim ummah and Ottoman pan-Islamism. Finally, building on systematic analysis of statements by AKP cadres—mostly by President Erdoğan—it demonstrates how the AKP came to embrace a pan-Islamic solution to the Kurdish conflict, what steps it took toward accomplishing it, and how its attitude toward Kurds compares to that of the Ottomans toward their Muslim subjects.

Interplay between Territory and Dispersal in Khaled Hosseini’s Works

Hosseini is an Afghan-born American writer who writes in the backdrop of socio-political turmoil of Afghanistan since Russian invasion against his native land. Hosseini’s works advocate dispersal to the Western world as the only panacea for the ills of racial and class discrimination, ethnic divide, socio-economic injustice, misogyny and religious division in Afghanistan. Keeping in view the interplay between territory and dispersal and the longing for assimilation in migrants, I have selected A. J. Cascardi’s concept of ‘The will to self-revision’ and ‘autonomous existence’ as theoretical standpoint that requires the individual to revoke his social and filial bonds to carve out his pleasures. I have also taken assistance from Georg Lukacs’ theory of ‘transcendental homelessness’. The analysis establishes that the young migrants are readily inclined towards assimilation in the host culture by trading off their familial bonds to carve out their economic and cultural growth.

What Is Constitutional Citizenship and How Can We Study It?

Closing the first, introductory, part of the book, this chapter presents some of the main ways in which citizenship and constitutions / constitutional law can and do iterate with each other at the top level (i.e. via the texts of the constitution and of constitutional law and in respect of constitutional principles and conventions). The chapter then places these issues into a broader context, exploring issues such as the legacies of colonialism, understandings of citizenship outside the Global North and the so-called civic/ethnic divide in citizenship. The analysis contests some of the presuppositions that lie behind the idea that citizenship of a state could operate as the sole or even central model of citizenship.

Ethnic Diversity, Political Aspirations and State Response: A Case Study of Pakistan

This article seeks to analyse the ineluctable dilemma of Pakistan, how to weave a viable national identity out of the regional and linguistic loyalties and their political-aspirations. Ethnic divide or ethnic militancy ranging from autonomy to political reorganisation has been a constant phenomenon haunting Pakistani politics. It also aims at highlighting failure of the Pakistani state to translate its socio-cultural diversity in political terms, something that is at the heart of the country’s persistent problem of political order and legitimacy. The state in Pakistan has taken recourse to coercive measures, irrespective of the type of government (civilian or military), from the very beginning to counter the political demands of various ethnic groups in the country. The Pakistani state’s response towards ethnic demands has been shaped by ‘law and order’ and ‘assimilation’ orientation rather than that of a dignified accommodation of the diverse ethnicities.

In South Africa, “Rhodes Must Fall” (while Rhodes’ Walls Rise)

The African borders established in Berlin in 1884–85, at the peak of Cecil John Rhodes’ South African ambitions, were functional to the main five colonial-imperial powers, but certainly not to African societies then, nor to future generations. The residues of Rhodes’ settler-colonial racism and extractive-oriented looting include major cities such as Johannesburg, which are witnessing worse inequality and desperation, even a quarter of a century after apartheid fell in 1994. In South Africa’s financial capital, Johannesburg, a combination of post-apartheid neoliberalism and regional subimperial hegemony amplified xenophobic tendencies to the boiling point in 2019. Not only could University of Cape Town students tear down the hated campus statue of Rhodes, but the vestiges of his ethnic divide-and-conquer power could be swept aside. Rhodes did “fall,” in March 2015, but the South African working class and opportunistic politicians took no notice of the symbolic act, and instead began to raise Rhodes’ border walls ever higher, through ever more violent xenophobic outbreaks. Ending the populist predilection towards xenophobia will require more fundamental changes to the inherited political economy, so that the deep structural reasons for xenophobia are ripped out as convincingly as were the studs holding down Rhodes’ Cape Town statue.

A Multilevel Intervention: The Case of the Cyprus Gender Advisory Team (GAT) Achievements and Challenges

In this article, we discuss Gender Advisory Team (GAT)’s multilevel linkage strategy—Macro–Meso–Micro—in promoting women’s ideas and views on the different issues discussed at the negotiating table and raising public awareness on GAT’s recommendations regarding the issues of governance and power-sharing from a gender and feminist perspective as well as on property, economy, citizenship, and education in a federal reunited Cyprus. In this article, we give examples only on governance and citizenship. Our feminist take on these issues necessitates a perspective that transcends the ethnic divide and includes the Women, Peace and Security agenda. We argue that Cypriot women’s concerns, needs, and gender mainstreaming as well an inclusive process should be prioritised at all levels of institutions. We conclude with GAT’s impact and challenges.

State Ownership and “State-Sharing”: The Role of Collective Identities and the Sociopolitical Cleavage between Ethnic Macedonians and Ethnic Albanians in the Republic of North Macedonia

The article analyzes, from a historical and institutional perspective, the sociopolitical cleavages existing between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians in the Republic of North Macedonia. Although primarily ethnic, the division between the two groups is deeply connected to state ownership and the official status each group occupies and wishes to occupy in it. By scrutinizing both groups’ claims, standpoints, and dissatisfactions, the article asserts that the implementation of consociationalism in 2001, through the de facto institutionalization of ethnicity, has partly soothed both groups’ frustrations, using the pragmatic exploitation of the existing ethnic divide as a proxy for “state sharing” in addition to power sharing.