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This report examines how long-term socioeconomic and environmental changes have shaped the context for poverty and food insecurity in Afghanistan. An estimated 97% of the population is currently under the poverty line and over half the population of 36 million people need immediate humanitarian support. , Following the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021, Afghanistan has faced an international freeze on development and governance assistance, a freezing of the Afghan State Bank’s assets in the United States and Europe, a severe weakening of both private and public sector and a mass-scale unemployment. This, coupled with the rise in commodity prices has increased poverty and hunger prevalence to emergency levels. Moreover, new regulations imposed by the Taliban leadership on female education, employment and mobility has increased challenges for women to accessing jobs in both private and public sector. The situation looks likely to worsen in both the short and longer terms.

This NCHS paper examines the use of the term legal pluralism in Afghanistan and argues that where access to justice is particularly difficult or neglected, social actors face an absence rather than a plurality of legal orders. The paper was originally developed as a contribution to the report Afghanistan and the Rule of Law after 2021: Legal and Social Developments by the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law .

Humanitarian wars are a primary means of globally affirming a specific model of humanity, built according to the cultural, moral, and economic standards of Western democracies. How are forms of humanity produced in the context of humanitarian war in Afghanistan? How are notions of freedom mobilized? How does the idea of a prospective humanity relate to the use of military force? In an attempt to reflect on the different configurations of freedom and humanity that emerged in the context of recent Afghanistan conflicts and international interventions, this article addresses the perspective of two key figures: the Taliban and the humanitarian soldier. Building on narratives such as poetry, interviews, and conversations conducted during fieldwork, this angle allows us to observe the complexity of the Afghan humanitarian theatre in a way that goes beyond mere assessments of political and economic interests, revealing a fragment of global contemporaneity that is crucial for understanding how processes of producing humanity combine with war and humanitarian efforts., Anuac, Vol 8, No 1 (2019)

رئیس محکمه استیناف مبارزه با جرایم سنگین فساد اداری و شخصیت برجسته قضای کنونی افغانستان می گوید : " من معتقدم که سیستم قضایی افغانستان جایگاه حقیقی خود را باز می یابد. هنوز مشکلات وجود دارد ، اما پیشرفت قابل توجهی در حال انجام است . اگر وضعیت کنونی ادامه یابد ، من به آینده قوه قضائیه در افغانستان خوشبین هستم . با این حال ، اگر این روند به دلیل درگیری یا ناآرامی های سیاسی و اجتماعی قطع شود ، هیچ کس نمی داند که آینده سیستم قضایی چگونه خواهد بود . " ما در 11 ژوئن 2020 با او مصاحبه کردیم .

Expert witness for the inquiry on the United Kingdom and Afghanistan, Committee on International Relations and Defence, House of Lords.

Afghan paramilitary forces working with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long been a staple in the US war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the border region with Pakistan. The problems associated with these militias take on new significance given the recent momentum in talks between the US government and the Taliban about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. Whose interests do the militias represent? How can they be integrated into a peace agreement – if at all? Will their use value for the US in future counterterrorist operations outweigh the case for closing them down in the service of human rights and a sustainable peace? The militias are at least nominally controlled by their CIA paymaster, but to what extent will the operations of the CIA be monitored and streamlined with overall US policy towards Afghanistan? The CIA-supported militias are a particularly troublesome version of the regionally based militias in Afghanistan that have developed over the years around local strongmen with external support. The present units originate in the 2001 invasion, when US military forces and the CIA organized Afghan militias to fight Islamist militants. Almost two decades later, the CIA is still running local militias in operations against the Taliban and other Islamist militants. Throughout, the militias reportedly have committed serious human rights abuses, including numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians. CIA sponsorship ensures that their operations are clouded in secrecy. There is virtually no public oversight of their activities or accountability for grave human rights abuses. This paper pulls together publicly available information about the “CIA’s Afghan Army,” charts the problems it represents for creating a sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan, and examines possible measures for addressing these problems.

This article analyses the link between politics of enslavement, war and collective emancipation with particular reference to the Hazaras, an ethnic-religious minority of Afghanistan. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the ambivalence and concerns that have accompanied the emancipatory process of the Hazaras – marked by war and large-scale violence. Today the political subjugation suffered by the Hazaras is a key element of their ‘political discourse’ and collective identity. However the rhetoric of emancipation can be misleading when used to understand the historical processes that have characterized Hazaras’ enslavement as well as their ‘exiting strategies’.

Anthropologists are chronologically only the latest to have adopted justice (and injustice) as an object of (critical) inquiry. Even among anthropologists, however, the radical critical cry that law is the instrument par excellence of control and repression, has today fallen out of fashion. Starting from the Afghan case, in this paper I reflect on law as a potential source of violence and as an anti-value - in the sense of being in antithesis with accepted social values - in the contemporary global scenario. My focus here is neither on the uses that can be made of law nor on the outcomes of its interpretation and application. Rather, I am interested in what law can generate when it betrays social values and sentiments of justice. © RAI 2014.

‘Humanitarian boredom’ produces its own perspective on the world, providing a ‘point of entry’ to the observation of humanitarianism in practice. In this paper, while problematizing both a general understanding of boredom and a romantic idea of humanitarianism, the author focuses on boredom as experienced by humanitarian workers during crises in the humanitarian realm.

In anthropological and legal literature, the phenomenon termed 'legal pluralism' has been interpreted as a co-presence of legal orders which act in relation to their own 'levels' of referring 'fields'. The Afghan normative network is generally described in terms of pluralism, where different normative systems coexist: such as customs, shari'a (Islamic law), state laws and principles deriving from international standard of rights (e.g., human rights). In this article I abandon the neutral category of legal pluralism in order to bring forward a hypothesis of an inaccessible normative pluralism as a key concept in order to capture the structural injustices, of which Afghans are victims. Globally, the debates concerning the diffusion and application of human rights develop at the same time ideologically, politically and pragmatically. Today in Afghanistan these levels are expressed in all their complexity and ambivalence; it is therefore particularly significant to closely observe the work done by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Starting with my research fieldwork in Afghanistan (2005-2012) - where I studied judicial practices in the courts of Kabul, developing a reflection which weaves the spread of human rights with the themes of injustice and inaccessibility - I argue in this article the urgency and the necessity to concentrate on the contingent dimension of (in)justice.; L'inaccessible pluralisme normatif et les droits de l'homme en Afghanistan Dans la littérature anthropologique et juridique le phénomène appelé " pluralisme juridique " est interprété comme une co-présence des ordres juridique qui agissent dans le même contexte social. Le système juridique afghan est généralement décrit comme un pluralisme juridique dans lequel différents systèmes de réglementation cohabitent : les pratiques coutumières, la charia (loi islamique), les lois de l'état et les principes dérivés à partir de normes internationales du droit (par exemple les droits de l'homme). Dans cet article, je renonce à la catégorie neutre de " pluralisme juridique " en faveur de l'hypothèse d'un pluralisme normatif inaccessible comme concept clé pour la compréhension des injustices structurelles dont les Afghans sont victimes. De mon travail de recherche sur le terrain en Afghanistan (2005-2012) - au cours duquel j'ai étudié les pratiques judicaires dans les tribunaux de Kaboul, en développant une réflexion qui relie les thèmes des droits de l'homme avec ceux des injustices et de l'inaccessibilité - je soutiens, dans cet article, l'urgence et la nécessité de mettre l'accent sur la dimension contingente de l'(in)justice.