Download or read book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan written by Barnett R. Rubin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monumental book examines Afghan society in conflict, from the 1978 communist coup to the fall of Najibullah, the last Soviet-installed president, in 1992. This edition, newly revised by the author, reflects developments since then and includes material on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. It is a book that now seems remarkably prescient. Drawing on two decades of research, Barnett R. Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan, provides a fascinating account of the nature of the old regime, the rise and fall of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the troubled Mujahidin resistance. He relates all these phenomena to international actors, showing how the interaction of U.S. policy and Pakistani and Saudi Arabian interests has helped to create the challenges of today. Rubin puts into context the continuing turmoil in Afghanistan and offers readers a coherent historical explanation for the country’s social and political fragmentation. Praise for the earlier edition: "This study is theoretically informed, empirically grounded, and gracefully written. Anyone who wants to understand Afghanistan’s troubled history and the reasons for its present distress should read this book.” —Foreign Affairs "This is the book on Afghanistan for the educated public.” —Political Science Quarterly

Download or read book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on two decades of research, Barnett R. Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan, provides a fascinating account of the nature of the old regime, the rise and fall of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the troubled mujahidin resistance. He relates all these phenomena to international actors, showing how the interaction of U.S. policy and Pakistani and Saudi Arabian interests has helped to create the challenges of today. Rubin puts into context the continuing turmoil in Afghanistan and offers readers a coherent historical explanation for the country's social and political fragmentation."--Jacket.

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Barnett R. Rubin and published by What Everyone Needs to Know(r). This book was released on 2020 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through much of the twentieth century Afghanistan seemed to be a distant concern in the U.S. "Afghanistanism" used to be journalistic shorthand for stories about distant places that editors dismissed as irrelevant. Afghanistan's territory does include some remote, barely accessible regions, but it also includes ancient metropolises such as Balkh, Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar that through much of history were crossroads for commerce and the spread of ideas, including religions and artistic styles. Afghanistan's period of isolation was not an inevitable consequence of its location; it was the result of the policies of the British and Russian colonial empires. In the late 19th and 20th century, those empires agreed to make Afghanistan a buffer state separating their two empires. The only foreign representative would be a Muslim representative of British India, which controlled Afghanistan's foreign affairs. That arrangement has broken down so thoroughly, that Afghanistan is now the opposite of a buffer state. Instead of preventing conflict by separating empires or states, it has become an arena where others act out proxy conflicts. The Soviet invasion of December 1979 turned the country into the hottest conflict of a supposedly Cold War. The Afghan state collapsed in the 1990s as a result of that proxy war and the breakup of the USSR, which had been funding the state. The country then became the arena of conflict among regional powers - Pakistan versus Iran, Russia, and India - but also a zone of competition over pipeline routes among the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran."--

Download or read book Revolution Unending written by Gilles Dorronsoro and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-02 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having traveled and researched in Afghanistan since 1988, Gilles Dorronsoro has developed a rich and nuanced understanding of the country's history and people. In Revolution Unending he draws on his extensive firsthand experience to consider the political, historical, economic, and ethnic factors that will influence Afghanistan's future. He argues that U.S. optimism about Afghanistan following Western intervention and recent elections fails to appreciate the divisions that continue to define the country. While not underestimating the oft-cited "ethnic factor" in Afghan politics, especially Pashtun dominance, Dorronsoro argues that class and the competition for employment and education are key factors in explaining the country's recent past. The 1990s saw the triumph of religious authorities (the ulema) and the marginalization of the traditional elites. With coalition intervention in 2001 and the subsequent deposition of the ulema-dominated Taliban, the educated elites are back in power. However, as Dorronsoro argues, patching up the country by means of short-term ethnic alliances and a new division of the spoils will only perpetuate the schisms in society. The Afghan civil war, Dorronsoro suggests, is set to continue and perhaps worsen over time.

Download or read book Aid Paradoxes in Afghanistan written by Nematullah Bizhan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between aid and state building is highly complex and the effects of aid on weak states depend on donors’ interests, aid modalities and the recipient’s pre-existing institutional and socio-political conditions. This book argues that, in the case of Afghanistan, the country inherited conditions that were not favourable for effective state building. Although some of the problems that emerged in the post-2001 state building process were predictable, the types of interventions that occurred—including an aid architecture which largely bypassed the state, the subordination of state building to the war on terror, and the short horizon policy choices of donors and the Afghan government—reduced the effectiveness of the aid and undermined effective state building. By examining how foreign aid affected state building in Afghanistan since the US militarily intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001 until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s first term in 2009, this book reveals the dynamic and complex relations between the Afghan government and foreign donors in their efforts to rebuild state institutions. The work explores three key areas: how donors supported government reforms to improve the taxation system, how government reorganized the state’s fiscal management system, and how aid dependency and aid distribution outside the government budget affected interactions between state and society. Given that external revenue in the form of tribute, subsidies and aid has shaped the characteristics of the state in Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century, this book situates state building in a historical context. This book will be invaluable for practitioners and anyone studying political economy, state building, international development and the politics of foreign aid.

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Barnett R. Rubin and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empires of Mud written by Antonio Giustozzi and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Empires of Mud' analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan. It analyses aspects of the Afghan environment that might have been conductive to the fragmentation of central authority and the emergence of warlords and then accounts for the emergence of warlordism in the 1980s.

Download or read book Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa written by Michael Woldemariam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When insurgent organizations factionalize and fragment, it can profoundly shape a civil war: its intensity, outcome, and duration. In this extended treatment of this complex and important phenomenon, Michael Woldemariam examines why rebel organizations fragment through a unique historical analysis of the Horn of Africa's civil wars. Central to his view is that rebel factionalism is conditioned by battlefield developments. While fragmentation is caused by territorial gains and losses, counter-intuitively territorial stalemate tends to promote rebel cohesion and is a critical basis for cooperation in war. As a rare effort to examine these issues in the context of the Horn of Africa region, based upon extensive fieldwork, this book will interest both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in insurgent groups and conflict dynamics.

Download or read book The Fragmentation of Culture in Afghanistan written by Larry P. Goodson and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Barnett Rubin and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barnett R. Rubin, one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary conflict and politics in Afghanistan, offers unique insights into the country's turbulent history, gleaned from four decades of work as a scholar and practitioner for both the United Nations and the United States. After situating the formation of modern Afghanistan in its long-term historical context, Rubin focuses on the period of armed conflict that began in 1978. The book analyzes the local, national, regional, and global shifts on social structure and the economy that perpetuated violent conflict while transforming its structure. Rubin's own analysis is complemented by guest chapters by world experts on Afghanistan's aid economy, drug industry, and the Taliban.

Download or read book Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan written by Noah Coburn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume shows how Afghani elections since 2004 have threatened to derail the country’s fledgling democracy. Examining presidential, parliamentary, and provincial council elections and conducting interviews with more than one hundred candidates, officials, community leaders, and voters, the text shows how international approaches to Afghani elections have misunderstood the role of local actors, who have hijacked elections in their favor, alienated communities, undermined representative processes, and fueled insurgency, fostering a dangerous disillusionment among Afghan voters.

Download or read book Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror written by Barnett R. Rubin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles written from 1989 to 2009, updated for this volume.

Download or read book Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror written by Barnett R. Rubin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our foremost authorities on modern Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin has dedicated much of his career to the study of this remote mountain country. He served as a special advisor to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke during his final mission to the region and still serves the Obama administration under Holbrooke's successor, Ambassador Marc Grossman. Now Rubin distills his unmatched knowledge of Afghanistan in this invaluable book. He shows how the Taliban arose in resistance to warlords some of whom who were raping and plundering with impunity in the vacuum of authority left by the collapse of the Afghan state after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban built on a centuries-old tradition of local leadership by students and teachers at independent, rural madrasas--networks that had been marginalized by the state-building royal regime that was itself destroyed by the Soviets and radicalized by the resistance to the invasion. He examines the arrival of Arab Islamists, the missed opportunities after the American-led intervention, the role of Pakistan, and the challenges of reconstruction. Rubin provides first-hand accounts of the bargaining at both the Bonn Talks of 2001 and the Afghan Constitutional Loya Jirga of 2003-2004, in both of which he participated as a UN advisor. Throughout, he discusses the significance of ethnic rivalries, the drug trade, human rights, state-building, US strategic choices, and international organizations, analyzing the missteps in these areas taken by the international community since 2001. The book covers events till the start of the Obama administration, and the final chapters provide an inside look at some of the thinking that is shaping today's policy debates inside the administration. Authoritative, nuanced, and sweeping in scope, Afghanistan in the Post-Cold War Era provides deep insight into the greatest foreign policy challenge facing America today.

Download or read book Gendering Human Security in Afghanistan written by Ben Walter and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs the concept of human security to show what the term means from the perspective of women in Afghanistan. It engages with a well-established debate in academic and policy-making contexts regarding the utility of human security as a framework for understanding and redressing conflict. The book argues that this concept allows the possibility of articulating the substantive experiences of violence and marginalisation experienced by people in local settings as well as their own struggles towards a secure and happy life. In this regard, it goes a long way to making sense of the complex dynamics of conflict which have confounded Western policy-makers in their ongoing state-building mission in Afghanistan. However, despite this inherent potential, the idea of human security still needs refinement. Crucially, it has benefitted from critical feminist and critical social theories which provide the conceptual and methodological depth necessary to apprehend what a progressive ethical program of security looks like and how it can be furthered. Using this framework, the work provides a critical reconstruction of the effect of the US-led Western Intervention on women’s experiences of (in)security in the three provincial contexts of Nangarhar, Bamiyan and Kabul. This reconstruction is drawn from a wealth of historical and contemporary sociological research alongside original fieldwork undertaken in Delhi, India, during 2011 with women and men from the country’s different communities. This book will be of much interest to students of human security, state-building, gender politics, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

Download or read book Love War in Afghanistan written by Alex Klaits and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love and War in Afghanistan presents true stories of fourteen ordinary men and women living in Northern Afghanistan. In a quarter-century of uninterrupted war, the people of Afghanistan have endured foreign invasions, ethnic strife, a fundamentalist Islamic totalitarian regime, and the unending crossfire of rival warlord factions. The country remains an object of fascination for journalists, academics, and filmmakers from around the world. In the midst of it all it is a startlingly powerful experience to discover, here, the voices of the Afghan people themselves. Young lovers who elope against the wishes of their kin; a mullah whose wit is his only defense against his armed captors; a defector from the Soviet army; a woman who is forced to stand up to gangsters in Tajikistan—their dramatic stories emerge in their own unforgettable words. Whether in the sudden awakening of mercy in a Taliban militiaman, the lingering contempt of a woman for her husband’s first wife, the pain and confusion of flight into exile, or the resourcefulness of a child who must provide for an entire family, the real focus of these narratives is the strength of solitary individuals faced daily with their own vulnerability. Men, women, orphans, widows, widowers, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Turkmens, schoolteachers, mullahs, former Taliban, mujahideen, big brothers, little sisters, captive wives, lovers in flight: Love and War in Afghanistan tells their stories, putting human faces onto a country torn by war.

Download or read book The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan written by Robert D. Crews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [This book] explores ... how has a seemingly anachronistic band of religious zealots managed to retain a tenacious foothold in the struggle for Afghanistan's future ... [It] investigates ... questions relating to the character of the Taliban, its evolution over time, and its capacity to affect the future of the region.--Dust jacket.

Download or read book Constitutionalism in Context written by David S. Law and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-09 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its emphasis on emerging and cutting-edge debates in the study of comparative constitutional law and politics, its suitability for both research and teaching use, and its distinguished and diverse cast of contributors, this handbook is a must-have for scholars and instructors alike. This versatile volume combines the depth and rigor of a scholarly reference work with features for teaching in law and social science courses. Its interdisciplinary case-study approach provides political and historical as well as legal context: each modular chapter offers an overview of a topic and a jurisdiction, followed by a case study that simultaneously contextualizes both. Its forward-looking and highly diverse selection of topics and jurisdictions fills gaps in the literature on the Global South as well as the West. A timely section on challenges to liberal constitutional democracy addresses pressing concerns about democratic backsliding and illiberal and/or authoritarian regimes.