Preserving Afghanistan’s Intellectual, Human Rights and Peacebuilding Capacities

Since the international withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, millions of Afghans have faced concurrent human rights, humanitarian and political crises. After seizing power, the Taliban has severely restricted civic space, reinstituted gender apartheid and rejected efforts to construct a nominally inclusive political order.  The consequent throttling of international aid has deepened poverty and economic crises, with Taliban persecution of women limiting the effective and principled delivery of humanitarian aid. They have imposed extreme restrictions on the basic rights of women and girls, severely limiting their access to education, employment, and freedom of movement. While thousands of Afghans escaped following the collapse of the Afghan Republic, those who remained – including former officials, civic actors, and a young generation of female protestors – continue to face Taliban retribution and attacks. These developments have intensified fragmentation and polarisation within the broader Afghan community inside and outside the country, while also raising questions around the 20-year international intervention and current international policies towards the country and the Afghan people.

With previous assurances of a more moderate Taliban dissipating quickly and leverage waning, the international community today is struggling to understand and respond to both the new realities in Afghanistan and the imperative to draw lessons from the last 20 years of statebuilding, development and peacemaking from the Afghan, and not just international, experiences and perspectives. Even before the collapse, Afghanistan had been a contested site of knowledge production, with politically-relevant expertise playing a crucial role in shaping discourse, policy, and ultimately, outcomes. While discussions on  decolonizing knowledge production in research, academia and development have grown in recent years, the tendency for western expertise to dominate research and policymaking on Afghanistan persists in practice, marginalising local knowledge systems and limiting understanding of local communities, dynamics and cultures.  Some of the impact of these western-centric approaches rooted in orientalist traditions, such as the immutable nature of “tribes” ad ethnicity, have been made visible, others remain hidden and under-investigated.

In the aftermath of the Republic’s collapse, a blame narrative has painted many Afghans who had committed and contributed to the country’s progress, with broad strokes of cowardice and corruption. This has overshadowed tangible achievements made in health, education, democratic participation, freedom of expression, womens’ and other human rights, and the pursuit of scholarship and intellectual and individual freedoms while also obscuring the different factors and forces – internal and external – that pushed and pulled towards cooperation, fragmentation and collapse. It has also overshadowed the international community’s continued failure to establish a dignified, humane and adequate response to the evacuation and resettlement of Afghan allies and those at extreme risk. Existing pathways are cumbersome and slow-moving (often taking years), leaving individuals in a dangerous no-man’s-land – with widespread reports of Afghans being killed and disappeared by the Taliban. For those who do manage to leave Afghanistan, the risk of deportation looms large. 

Two years after the collapse, Afghan civic actors – from activists and educators to doctors and nurses – are facing not only an uncertain future, but often harassment, arrests and violent reprisals. Many have been forced to flee Afghanistan and now find themselves dispersed across the world as refugees and asylum seekers stuck in limbo. Many others remain in hiding. Despite initial attention on international schemes to support, protect and/or relocate civic actors and human rights defenders, many of these efforts have dwindled, leaving thousands of Afghans in risky situations both inside Afghanistan and across the region. For those at-risk Afghans successfully relocated, few of these initiatives provide sufficient support to continue their research, activism and work in a sustainable manner, threatening the country’s most significant resource: its people.

When external actors assume control over knowledge production on Afghanistan, they frequently reinforce biased, oversimplified and reductive narratives rooted in  neo-colonial  stereotypes. This includes portraying Afghans as inherently backward, resistant to reform, or prone to gender oppression and  violence. These distorted representations not only hinder efforts to address the complex root causes of conflict, poverty, and inequality in Afghanistan but also disempower and harm Afghans, perpetuating neo-imperial interests.

 – Afghan scholar in exile, February 2023

Today, the fragmentation in the Afghan civic space inside and outside the country is deepening, partly due to a highly toxic political context marked by a breakdown in trust and intense competition over shrinking resources. Moreover, there is a lack of a shared understanding of what potential pathways exist to promote stability, and of how different policy priorities and interventions – across humanitarian, security, and political domains – could be combined to shape pathways for stability. While the dominant approach focuses on how best to engage the Taliban, there remains little appreciation that a complex 40 year conflict requires dialogue processes at multiple levels that involve a range of issues and an array of actors (civilians, women, youth, elders, etc.)  to create the right conditions and incentives for stability.  

As part of the Peace and Conflict Research Evidence Platform (PeaceRep) and the Civicness and Conflict Research Group at LSE IDEAS, we have established the Afghanistan Research Network as a modest first step to preserve, sustain and amplify Afghan expertise and knowledge in order to better understand Afghanistan’s interlocking crises, and provide analysis that can inform creative actions in the short-term and help shape future prospects for a more stable and pluralistic Afghanistan in the long-term.

Aims of the Afghanistan Research Network

• Preserving and supporting Afghan expertise: Together, those inside and outside of the country possess deep expertise across a range of thematic issues, experience in policy design and advocacy, and extensive networks within the country. These are critical not only in preserving knowledge, capturing lessons learned, and retaining institutional memory and capacity, but also to help shape international and diaspora responses in ways that effectively meet humanitarian needs  in the short term, and support the Afghan people in their ongoing struggle for a pluralistic and stable society in the long term. Central to this effort is providing space for and amplifying Afghan knowledge and narration on the past, present and future.  
• Supporting Afghan civic capacities and informed dialogue: To address the critical need and wish for more structured and facilitated engagements between diverse Afghans on key issues, exchange of information, and joint analysis and capacity-building. Collaborative learning processes can be an effective way to respond to a multi-dimensional crisis, in part by creating platforms for informed dialogue and deliberation that can reduce tensions, build trust and solidarity, and promote peacebuilding approaches.
• Strengthening Afghan-driven policy advice to international practitioners: Utilising the knowledge within Afghan communities and empowering recent refugees/evacuees to continue dialogue, policy debate, and international engagement (linked to civic actors and networks in Afghanistan) is vital for informing viable policies for international policy makers that can address the accelerating crises Afghanistan faces. 

On the politics of knowledge production

This initiative emphasises the vital role of knowledge production and civic engagement in conflict mitigation and peacebuilding. A key concern raised within the Afghan expert community is how Afghan knowledge (and ‘voice’) was and is used, extracted, manipulated and appropriated by Western researchers and institutions without providing them the platform or opportunity to develop or speak on their own research and lived experience.  By positioning Afghan experts as experts rather than research assistants or informants, this research network is designed to confront and address ethical questions around whose voices and expertise count.

Today, in a context where freedom of expression and assembly are suppressed by the Taliban in an effort to control the information environment, these hierarchies of knowledge production in research, academia and political discourse have become more acute. Western experts and journalists are able to conduct research in Afghanistan  (albeit monitored by the de facto authorities) while Afghan experts and researchers are unable to do so and remain in hiding or scattered as refugees.  

Responding to fragmentation through dialogue and joint analysis

A key question for many Afghans is how to foster a pluralistic and peaceful political order/culture in  Afghanistan that ensures the protection and rights of all Afghans from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders and political viewpoints. Top-down efforts by the international community to engage the Taliban in a political process that expands inclusion has had limited impact, with the Taliban continuing to reject basic international norms. This echoes past failed strategies that similarly centred on factional and ethnic representation and excluded the interests and voices of the majority of Afghans.  

At the same time, for Afghans who have the opportunity to engage in research, political discourse, or participate in various international platforms, a challenge arises from the tendency of international actors to expect civil society or Afghan women, for example,  to conform to a single voice for the sake of ‘legitimate representation’.  This expectation of a singular narrative may be convenient for policy uptake, but it limits the potential to understand and engage the multiple realities, nuanced complexities  and range of experiences, opinions and actors that exist across a diverse society. Moreover, calls for a ‘single voice’ to represent the interests of civil society or women have only served to deepen tensions and fragmentary dynamics within Afghanistan’s diverse civil society rather than support consensus-seeking efforts on foundational principles and shared visions. 

In this context, micro-dialogues and exchanges involving diverse groups of experts and activists can hold inherent value and may be better suited to address some of the complexities of a fragmented and politically toxic environment.  They may not only  offer an alternative to traditional top-down approaches, but can also begin a process among Afghans with diverse views to build bridges, substantively think through trade-offs, and lay the foundation for a political culture of dialogue.   

Part of our approach focuses on the process of convening and linking together a diverse group of Afghan experts and activists, creating a space for informed dialogues across a range of Afghan actors to deliberate on key issues and principles and engage in collective problem solving and action, and thus, help to enhance Afghan capacity to reduce tensions and develop a shared vision for the future. The experience of PeaceRep in other constrained contexts supports these findings, and argues that ‘micro-mediation’ processes or dialogues are intrinsically valuable and can better help navigate fragmented environments and work towards building inclusive, participatory, and contextually relevant solutions for sustainable peace and development. 

Over the coming weeks we will be publishing a series of research papers, analyses and reflections from a range of Afghan experts now forced to live outside the country, with diverse expertise and backgrounds investigating a range of issues, including the Afghan political economy, humanitarian practices and the effective delivery of aid in a politically-constrained environment, gender apartheid and human rights documentation, political dialogue, and community-based development.

The Afghanistan Research Network reflections series

• What Could Shape the Conditions for Dialogue in Afghanistan? – Aref Dostyar and Zmarai Farahi
• Afghanistan Post-2021: The New Political Economy of Growth – Omar Joya
• Afghanistan’s Human Rights Ecosystem after the Taliban Takeover – Razia Sayed and Iavor Rangelov
• Analysing Taliban’s Budget Expenditures and Revenues: Understanding the Regime’s Policies and Priorities – Salma Alokozai and Khalid Payenda
• A Glass Half Empty? An Afghan Economy Without Women – Valentina Finckenstein
• Recognition of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan Justified – Metra Mehran
• Managing Climate Change under the De Facto Authorities – Idrees Malyar
• Humanitarian Aid Delivery in Contemporary Afghanistan – Hila-Nawa Alam
• Afghanistan’s Minerals: Past and Present – Ghazaal Habibyar and Javed Noorani
• The Future of the Banking Industry in Afghanistan – Matiullah Faeeq
• The Taliban and the Rural-Urban Divide – Hosna Jalil
• In Search of Results: Incentives-Oriented Programs in Afghanistan 2002-2021 – Aman Farahi
• Aid Coordination and Delivery in Afghanistan: Assessing Past and Current Architecture – Naheed Sarabi
• Da Afghanistan Bank’s Foreign Exchange Reserves – Khan Afzal Hadawal
• Supporting Afghan Researchers at Risk: Critical Analysis of Key Lessons – Marika Theros, Sahar Halaimzai, Sobia Kapadia
• The Evolving Information Environment in Afghanistan – Salem Ibrahimi and Sam Vincent
• Addressing Afghan Refugee Mental Health through Culturally Fluent Interventions: A Call to Incorporate Lay Mental Health Workers while Addressing SDOH – Halima Ahmadi-Montecalvo, Amanda Terry and Rosalind Rogers

About the authors

Sahar Halaimzai is an Associate Fellow with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE, and Deputy Director of the Civic Engagement Project.

Marika Theros is a Policy Fellow with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE, focusing on Afghan peace processes.

Learn more about PeaceRep’s Afghanistan research