The International Community and the 'Shura Strategy' in Afghanistan

Abstract

The 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.