The Centre for Afghanistan Studies organized a talk titled “Afghanistan, the Taliban Regime and the Question of Governance” on 29th September 2021, featuring Professor Omar Sharifi
About The Speaker:
Omar Sharifi is Assistant Professor in the American University of Afghanistan, the Senior Research Fellow and Kabul Director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. He is Asia Society Fellow and member of Afghan 21 Young Leaders Forum. He is graduated from Kabul Medical Institute in 2003. Following his medical studies, he worked as Head of research and publications for the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society in Kabul, and as Director of the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan. From 2006 to 2008, he studied Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University in New York under a Fulbright Fellowship. He also received a fellowship, through the Rumsfeld Foundation at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD in anthropology from Boston University in 2019.
Text from the Poster:
The link between state formation, political stability and governing legitimacy is well studied in political science and sociology. A number of scholars from various disciplines have wrestled with questions about the authority of the state in the Afghan context. As in many multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic Central Asian contexts, the relationship between the state and society in Afghanistan has historically depended on a system of reciprocity that bound national leaders to the local elite and them to the government. Afghan leaders engaged in continuous negotiations as a way to build a consensus between the central authorities and local elites.
Those that thought this unnecessary, such the Khalqis (a faction within the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) in 1978-9, soon found themselves unable to rule and were ousted from power. With the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, it is the second time that an ideological group are in control of power. Will the Taliban regime follow the fate of its predecessor, PDPA, or it will be able to accommodate itself to the complex socio-political system in Afghanistan.
About The Event:
The session commenced with introductory remarks by Professor Raghav Sharma, followed by a welcome note from Professor R. Sudarshan, Dean of the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. Professor Sharifi provided a deeply and thoughtful reading of Afghanistan’s changing political environment in the wake of the resurgence of the Taliban. He explored the historical nexus between the formation of the state and legitimacy of power and authority, and governance, noting how Afghanistan’s political mobilization had long been predicated on a tenuous balance between the interests of central authority and local power brokers. He, with a combination of historical reference and present observation, probed whether the Taliban and its current regime could return stability, or would be another ideological government which fell and repeated history.
The session transitioned into an animated discussion of issues of state power, ethnic pluralism, and the history of legitimacy in Afghanistan. The session concluded with remarks on governance by Prof. Sreeram Chaulia, Dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs, who concluded by noting the need for a greater critical engagement in Afghanistan’s governance challenges to better understand the future of the region.