The Rule of Law in Afghanistan
Missing in Inaction

A new understanding of the rule of law that explains the catastrophic underperformance of the West in Afghanistan.

Whit Mason (Edited by)

9781107003194, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 April 2011

366 pages, 4 b/w illus. 4 tables
23.5 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.7 kg

How, despite the enormous investment of blood and treasure, has the West's ten-year intervention left Afghanistan so lawless and insecure? The answer is more insidious than any conspiracy, for it begins with a profound lack of understanding of the rule of law, the very thing that most dramatically separates Western societies from the benighted ones in which they increasingly intervene. This volume of essays argues that the rule of law is not a set of institutions that can be exported lock, stock and barrel to lawless lands, but a state of affairs under which ordinary people and officials of the state itself feel it makes sense to act within the law. Where such a state of affairs is absent, as in Afghanistan today, brute force, not law, will continue to rule.

1. Introduction Whit Mason
Part I. The Scope and Nature of the Problem: 2. Approaching the rule of law Martin Krygier
3. Deiokes and the Taliban: local governance, bottom-up state formation and the rule of law in counterinsurgency David J. Kilcullen
Part II. The Context: Where We Started: 4. The international community's failures in Afghanistan Francesc Vendrell
5. The rule of law and the weight of politics: challenges and trajectories William Maley
6. Human security and the rule of law: Afghanistan's experience Shahmahmood Miakhel
Part III. The Political Economy of Opium: 7. The Afghan insurgency and organised crime Gretchen Peters
8. Afghanistan's opium strategy alternatives: a moment for masterful inactivity? Joel Hafvenstein
Part IV. Afghan Approaches to Security and the Rule of Law: 9. Engaging traditional justice mechanisms in Afghanistan: state-building opportunity or dangerous liaison? Susanne Schmeidl
10. Casualties of myopia Michael Hartmann
11. Land conflict in Afghanistan Colin Deschamps and Alan Roe
Part V. International Interventions: 12. Exogenous state-building: the contradictions of the international project in Afghanistan Astri Suhrke
13. Grasping the nettle: facilitating change or more of the same? Barbara J. Stapleton
14. Lost in translation: legal transplants without consensus-based adaptation Michael Hartmann and Agnieszka Klonowiecka-Milart
Part VI. Kandahar: 15. No justice, no peace: Kandahar, 2005–2009 Graeme Smith
16. Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban Shafiullah Afghan
Part VII. Conclusion: 17. Axioms and unknowns Whit Mason.

Subject Areas: International humanitarian law [LBBS], International human rights law [LBBR], Public international law [LBB], Diplomacy [JPSD], International relations [JPS]