Society, Culture, & Thought
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Item Global Justice and the Challenge of Radical Pluralism(2004-08) Voice, PaulPolitical philosophy has been under the sway of a certain picture since Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. This picture combines the idea that the problem of justice should be approached from the direction oi ideal normative theory, and that there are some anchoring ideas that secure the justificatory role of a hypothetical agreement. I think this picture and the hold it has over political philosophy is beginning to fragment. This fragmentation I think is most evident in the skepticism that has become a routine response to the Kantian idea that 'we' can 'discover' the terms of an agreement that has both a categorical force and a universal scope. But as the picture fragments we are still left with the framework and vocabulary of Rawls's difficult and elaborate theory. The major difficulty confronting the Rawlsian project (the problem of pluralism as I will argue below) is itself defined in terms of Rawls's conceptual language. And this serves only to obscure the real challenge and keep us 'bewitched' by Rawls's narrow way of seeing issues. In being bewitched in this way we do not see that the problem of pluralism confronts Rawls's project as a whole, rather than requiring adjustments and accommodations.Item Voting Together: Why Afghanistan’s 2009 Elections were (and were not) a Disaster(Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2009-11) Coburn, Noah; Larson, AnnaThe Afghan elections in 2009 have become infamous for low turnout, fraud and insecurity. Delay in announcing the results and rumours of private negotiations have increased existing scepticism of the electoral process among national and international commentators. What has been overlooked, however, is the way in which—at least at the local level—these elections have been used to change the balance of power in a relatively peaceful manner. In many areas of Afghanistan, the polls emphasised local divisions and groupings, and highlighted the importance of political and voting blocs (which can include ethnic groups, qawms, or even family units) in determining political outcomes. Also, while perhaps not “legitimate” by international standards, these elections reflected the highly localised cultural and social context in which they took place: a context that is often patronage-based and in which power is gained through constant struggle and dialogue between political groups and leaders. This study presents the August 2009 electoral process as it played out in three different areas of Kabul Province: Dasht-i Barchi, Qarabagh and Istalif. In each of these locations, the presidential and provincial council elections were key events in shifting the balance of local power. These areas also demonstrate the different ways in which voting blocs functioned and, while not representative of the country as a whole, provide valuable insights into the meaning and usefulness of elections at the local level.Item Losing Legitimacy? Some Afghan Views on the Government, the International Community, and the 2009 Elections(Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2009-11) Coburn, NoahTable of Contents No Single Opinion; Elections and Legitimacy; Has the Karzai Government been “Delegitimised?”; Have Elections in Afghanistan been “Delegitimised?”; The International Community: The Real Culprits?; Outcome as Opposed to Process; The Road from Here?Item Parliamentarians and Local Politics in Afghanistan Elections and Instability II(2010) Coburn, NoahThis paper is primarily an ethnographic description of parliamentary political culture at the local level in three provinces in Afghanistan. It is part of a wider research project on representative governance in Afghanistan that the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) has been conducting since 2008.1 The study focuses on the districts of Ahmadaba and Gardez City in Paktia Province; the districts of Kaldar, Dihdadi and Balkh in the province of Balkh; and Qara Bagh in the province of Kabul.Item Traditional Dispute Resolution and Stability in Afghanistan(United States Institute of Peace, 2010-02-16) Coburn, NoahStability in Afghanistan will remain elusive unless disputes between individuals and among communities can be resolved through peaceful and equitable means. However, state justice institutions are barely functioning in much of the country and are incapable of meeting many justice and dispute resolution needs of Afghans. Instead, the majority of Afghans turn to traditional justice mechanisms—including tribal councils and village and religious leaders—to address both civil and criminal disputes. In many parts of the country, including areas recently cleared of insurgents, the best way to make signi cant, visible, short-term (12 to 18 months) gains in peacefully resolving disputes is to work with community-based structures. USIP has drawn important lessons from its work with Afghan partners to implement pilot programs exploring links between the state and traditional justice systems in four provinces across the country (in Nangarhar, Khost, Paktia and Herat). Programs designed to create or strengthen existing links between traditional justice bodies and state institutions can build mutual trust and harness the strengths of each. Donor-funded traditional justice programs need to involve the Afghan government while also accounting for the practical needs of communities to settle disputes in line with their own traditions and procedures, as well as Afghanistan’s laws and human rights norms.Item Connecting with Kabul: The Importance of the Wolesi Jirga Election and Local Political Networks in Afghanistan(Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2010-05) Coburn, NoahThere is a renewal of interest in the lower house of Afghanistan’s parliament, known as the Wolesi Jirga, taking place in both Afghan domestic politics and international discussion about governance in Afghanistan. This is particularly in the wake of the house’s rejection of a significant number of ministerial nominees, its opposition to President Hamid Karzai’s recent election decree and its initial refusal to ratify the national budget. With an evolving relationship with the executive branch, and elections currently scheduled for 18 September 2010, there are many questions about the role of the Wolesi Jirga in national and local politics that have not been considered carefully enough. And despite widespread concern about fraud and corruption during the 2009 presidential and provincial council elections, there is little consensus on what lessons were learned from those elections or what parliamentary elections mean for politics in Afghanistan.Item Informal Dispute Resolution in Afghanistan(United States Institute of Peace, 2010-08) Coburn, Noah; Dempsey, JohnThis report discusses informal justice in Afghanistan and its relationship to state institutions. It draws on a series of pilot projects sponsored and overseen by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and on work by other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international donors, and the international military in Afghanistan, as well as on field visits by the authors. Over the past several years, the USIP team that oversaw the projects spoke with hundreds of Afghan government officials, community leaders, citizens, members of the NGO community, international government officials, and military personnel about informal justice issues. The report provides a summary of this research and a series of recommendations for the Afghan government and the international community engaged with rule of law in the country.Item Many Shuras Do Not a Government Make: International Community Engagement with Local Councils in Afghanistan(United States Institute of Peace, 2010-09-07) Coburn, Noah; Miakhel, ShahmahmoodThe need to engage local Afghan leaders and support community decision making has recently been promoted as a key element of both development and counterinsurgency strategies in Afghanistan. The resulting proliferation of community councils—commonly called shuras or jirgas— sponsored by different actors within the Afghan government and international community has decreased the effectiveness of local governance and rule of law in many places. Traditional Afghan dispute resolution and governance bodies are most effective when they are formed by local residents and genuinely reflect the interests of the community. Their legitimacy decreases if international or government sponsors create shuras or jirgas to promote their own interests. This paradox creates a dilemma for programs designed to foster good governance: how to promote community self-rule that reflects traditional values and mechanisms and that develop locally, while adhering to rigid counterinsurgency and development timelines and strategies. These so-called ‘traditional’ political structures have an important place in local governance in Afghanistan, but the international community should not assume that such bodies fairly represent their respective communities. Rather, sound understanding of local dynamics and in-depth consultation with local government actors and community leaders are necessary to help ensure that such bodies are represented and thus, legitimate within the community. A more coherent, sustainable vision of long-term local governance and coordinated strategies between the Afghan government and international forces is necessary to bring both stability and development to Afghanistan. In particular, this Peace Brief supports the attempts to create a coherent long-term goal of local governance based on legitimate local actors, most likely selected through elections.Item The International Community and the 'Shura Strategy' in Afghanistan(International Development Law Organization, 2011) Coburn, NoahThe international community in Afghanistan has increasingly come to realize that the failure of the Afghan state to provide citizens with predictable access to justice has contributed significantly to the insurgency in much of the country. As a result, funders, policy makers and the international military have increasingly looked to alternative approaches to justice that rely on informal, non-state actors. While this acknowledgement of legal pluralism in Afghanistan has been an important step in attempting to understand the local context for both rule of law and governance challenges, whether international programs aimed at engaging the informal justice sector are actually effective remains an open question.Item Undermining Representative Governance: Afghanistan’s 2010 Parliamentary Election and Its Alienating Impact(Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2011-02) Coburn, Noah; Larson, AnnaThis paper analyses the 2010 election as it happened in three provinces (Kabul, Balkh and Paktya), providing insight into the preparations, process and results in these areas. It situates the election in its political and historical context, drawing on an extensive two-year study by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) of Afghan perspectives on elections.Item Political Economy in the Wolesi Jirga: Sources of Finance and their Impact on Representation in Afghanistan’s Parliament(Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), 2011-05) Coburn, NoahItem Promoting Stability and Resolving Provincial Disputes in Afghanistan: USIP’s Dispute Councils Program(United States Institute of Peace, 2011-06-10) Coburn, Noah; Miakhel, ShahmahmoodCurrently numerous disputes at the local level are unresolved in Afghanistan, leading to local instability, a growing distance between the government and people and encouraging communities to turn to the Taliban. In March 2010, USIP began working with local elders, government officials (particularly governors and officials from the Ministry of Tribal Affairs) and religious figures to address a range of disputes in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan. These networks of elders, working closely with government officials and, in some cases, the international military, have addressed conflicts that include land disputes, criminal cases, and disputes involving the Taliban. Since 2010, USIP’s Dispute Resolution Project has participated in and recorded the resolution of over 120 cases. The project suggests several methods for facilitating dispute resolution that rely on flexible networks of locally legitimate political figures which will strengthen the government, promote rule of law and decrease the appeal of the Taliban.Item The Politics of Dispute Resolution and Continued Instability in Afghanistan(United States Institute of Peace, 2011-08) Coburn, NoahThis report argues that the assumed formal–informal dichotomy between justice systems in Afghanistan misdescribes the way in which most cases in the country are resolved. In fact, analysis in late 2010 of data from ongoing research and pilot projects sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace shows that most disputes have been handled by a combination of the two justice systems, with actors in each assuming different roles depending on the location and context of the dispute as well as on the parties involved, which has serious implications for many of the international programs recently created to engage the informal sector. Furthermore, this report suggests that the greatest barrier to local dispute resolution in Afghanistan is the current lack of security and political stability, which has made it more difficult for those involved in either formal or informal dispute-resolution systems to interact effectively.Item Afghanistan: a cultural and political history(Routledge, 2011-09) Coburn, NoahA review of the book Afghanistan: a cultural and political history, by Thomas Barfield, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010, 400 pp, US$29.95 (hardcover), ISBN 9780691145686Item Natural Exceptions to Green Sovereignty? American Environmentalism and the ‘‘Immigration Problem’’(Sage, 2012) Hultgren, JohnRather than making any general claims supporting or opposing the ‘‘greening’’ of sovereignty, this article examines the variable discourses through which the ethos of ecosovereignty is reconfigured. The questions that drive this inquiry are (1) through what discursive pathways do conceptions of nature, political community, and governance intersect to constitute exclusionary ethoses of ecosovereignty? and (2) how might alternative articulations challenge such exclusions? These questions are pursued by examining the contemporary American ‘‘environmental restrictionist’’ (immigration reduction environmentalist) movement, and critical responses to the movement. It traces how nature, political community, and governance are conceptualized and related to one another in efforts to bolster alternative configurations of ecosovereignty. By gaining insight into the various discourses through which iterations of ecosovereignty emerge, scholars and practitioners might better respond to the multiplicity of ways that nature becomes enmeshed in exclusionary social forms.Item Myths and Misconceptions in the Afghan Transition(United States Institute of Peace, 2012-04-09) Coburn, Noah; Miakhel, ShahmahmoodThe coming period of transition to Afghan control of national security will require greater cooperation and understanding between all parties. Cooperation between the international community, the Afghan government and local communities is currently being undermined by a series of myths and assumptions which stem from the unstable conditions, a perceived lack of shared interests and a handful of highly publicized incidents. The international community often underestimates local capacity for governance in Afghanistan and ignores the success that Afghanistan did have with self-rule for much of the 20th century. Local Afghan communities are skeptical of the aims of both counterinsurgency and state-building measures, as projects, such as internationally sponsored elections, have failed to yield anticipated results despite the continued presence of international troops. There is an urgent need to rethink some of the assumptions on both sides of the table which threaten to undermine the long-term prospects for peace in Afghanistan.Item Justifying the Means: Afghan Perceptions of Electoral Processes(United States Institute of Peace, 2013-03) Coburn, Noah; Larson, AnnaThis report focuses on local perceptions of the 2014 presidential elections in Afghanistan. It situates the elections within growing concerns about the political uncertainty of the upcoming transition and explores what Afghans might consider to be a “free and fair” poll in this context. The report details the findings from over fifty interviews conducted with respondents from three different regions of the country, both male and female, and representing all of the major ethnic groups. This research, funded by the United States Institute of Peace, builds, in particular, on earlier in-depth studies of the 2009 and 2010 elections conducted for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.Item Informal Justices and the International Community in Afghanistan(United States Institute of Peace, 2013-04) Coburn, NoahThis report analyzes the array of programs that dealt with the so-called informal justice sector in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2011. It focuses on a series of pilot projects sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace that engaged local Afghan organizations at the district and provincial levels to observe and record how informal justice systems resolve (or fail to resolve) people’s disputes, and how informal and formal justice actors relate to each other in practice. It also examines the expanding role of international actors in local dispute resolution and the impact that such interventions have had on local practices and perceptions of justice. The report finds that the informal justice sector provides a pervasive and effective, if sometimes flawed, venue for the majority of the Afghan population to access justice and argues that the international community should commit more fully to supporting local informal justice mechanisms.Item Beliefs Predicting Peace, Beliefs Predicting War: Jewish Americans and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict(Wiley, 2013-12) Ben Hagai, Ella; Zurbriggen, Eileen L.; Hammack, Phillip L.; Ziman, MeganJewish Americans’ beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can serve either to inhibit or to facilitate the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Attitudes toward conflict resolution and beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its origins were assessed among a sample of 177 Jewish Americans. Endorsement of a monolithic view of the conflict represented the strongest predictor of non-compromising attitudes toward the Palestinians. Endorsement of dehumanizing and delegitimizing statements about the Palestinians predicted non-compromising attitudes to a much lesser extent. A zero-sum view of the conflict and beliefs about collective victimhood did not predict non-compromising attitudes toward conflict resolution. Findings are discussed in terms of their challenge to theories of collective victimhood in conflict settings and their support for the centrality of narrative in conflict resolution and peacebuilding.Item The “Nature” of American Immigration Restrictionism(Routledge, 2014) Hultgren, JohnHow do commitments to nature factor into the American immigration restrictionist movement? This question initially appears odd; in contemporary American politics, environmentalism is generally assumed to be a value of the political left, and restrictionism of the right. Through an in-depth analysis of the American “environmental restrictionist” logic, this article suggests that the reality is more complicated. First, the historical trajectory of the relationship between nature and restrictionism is outlined, demonstrating that commitments to particular conceptions of nature have long intersected with American restrictionism. Second, textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis are employed in analyzing how contemporary activists making the environmental argument against immigration conceptualize nature and relate it to foundational ideals of political community, political economy, and governance. Three discourses of environmental restrictionism are identified, and the role that nature plays in each is detailed. The article concludes by reflecting on the resonance of these “natures” with mainstream American greens, and offering several prescriptions for environmentalists concerned with inclusion and social justice.