This article explores Western attempts to strengthen mechanisms of informal justice in Afghanistan. It traces the origins and evolution of an 'informal justice assemblage': the constellation of specific expert discourses, institutional practices, and strategic considerations that made it possible and plausible that Western actors should promote and work with informal processes of justice. The article problematizes expert statements that posit that working with informal justice is somehow more 'Afghan-led' and less of an outside imposition than supporting the country's formal justice system. To the contrary, this article details how -discursively and institutionally -academic authority about what is locally appropriate in practice served to foreclose national debate and scrutiny about the organization and administration of justice. This amounted to a net erosion of accountability, reinforced by the subsequent militarization of the justice sector and governance more broadly. In conclusion, the article calls for greater attention to the broader fields of power in which claims of sensitivity to the local sentiments and reality in Afghanistan are made.
This article explores constructions of gender, masculinity, and class in moral crimes prosecutions, and their legal aftermaths in Afghanistan. It argues that the lack of attention to men in advocacy and research about moral crimes, while reflecting a (geo-) politicized conflation of gender with women, constitute both an empirical and an analytical oversight. The first part of the article discusses the legal grounds for the prosecution of men for “moral crimes” in Afghanistan and presents statistical data that reveals large-scale incarceration of men for pursuing consensual, heterosexual relations, including the non-codified crime of elopement. In the second part, we use ethnographic data to probe into the ways in which the treatment of male elopers are based on specific notions of gender, sexuality, and masculinity. We suggest that the interrelated, yet differentiated, prosecution of male and female elopers in Afghanistan can be usefully understood in terms of a gender regime that places different expectations on men and women. Women’s gender performance is ranked according to (verifiable) chastity, men’s gender performance according to the (legitimate, i.e., honorable) command of resources.
This chapter analyses patterns of violent conflict in the developing world since the onset of decolonization. It examines shifts in how scholars and policymakers have understood such conflicts, and how these understandings have informed dynamics of foreign interventions and the international peace-building regime that developed in the 1990s. After providing an overview of decolonization and its aftermath, the chapter considers conflicts over social order during the Cold War as well as the nature of conflicts in the post-Cold-War period. It also discusses new forces that shaped conflict during the first decades of the twenty-first century, focusing on militant Islam and the ‘war on terror’, ‘people power’ and its aftermath, and the link between peace-building and military intervention in a multipolar world.
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