{"id":20602,"date":"2023-05-29T12:30:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T12:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peacerep.org\/?p=20602"},"modified":"2025-09-16T08:37:52","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T08:37:52","slug":"afghanistan-research-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gentest.cahss.ed.ac.uk\/dev-peacerep\/2023\/05\/29\/afghanistan-research-network\/","title":{"rendered":"Preserving Afghanistan\u2019s Intellectual, Human Rights and Peacebuilding Capacities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the international withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, millions of Afghans have faced concurrent <\/span>human rights<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>humanitarian<\/span><\/a> and political crises. After seizing power, the Taliban has severely restricted <\/span>civic space<\/span><\/a>, reinstituted gender apartheid and rejected efforts to construct a nominally inclusive political order.\u00a0 The consequent throttling of international aid has deepened poverty and economic crises, with Taliban persecution of women limiting the effective and <\/span>principled delivery of humanitarian aid<\/span><\/a>. 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 \u2013 including former officials, civic actors, and a young generation of female protestors \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

With previous assurances of a more <\/span>moderate Taliban dissipating<\/span><\/a> 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 <\/span>knowledge production<\/span><\/a>, with politically-relevant expertise playing a crucial role in shaping discourse, policy, and ultimately, outcomes. While discussions on\u00a0 decolonizing knowledge production in <\/span>research,<\/span><\/a> academia and <\/span>development<\/span><\/a> 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.\u00a0 Some of the impact of these western-centric approaches rooted in orientalist traditions, such as the immutable nature of \u201ctribes\u201d ad ethnicity, have been made <\/span>visible<\/span><\/a>, others remain hidden and under-investigated.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the <\/span>aftermath<\/span><\/a> of the Republic\u2019s collapse, a <\/span>blame<\/span><\/a> narrative has painted many Afghans who had committed and contributed to the country\u2019s progress, with broad strokes of cowardice and corruption. This has overshadowed tangible achievements made in health, education, democratic participation, freedom of expression, womens\u2019 and other human rights, <\/span>and the pursuit of scholarship and intellectual and individual freedoms while also obscuring the different factors and forces \u2013 internal and external \u2013 that pushed and pulled towards cooperation, fragmentation and collapse. It has also overshadowed the international community\u2019s <\/span>continued <\/span>failure<\/span><\/a> to establish a dignified, humane and adequate response to the evacuation and resettlement of <\/span>Afghan allies<\/span><\/a> and those at extreme risk. Existing pathways are cumbersome and <\/span>slow-moving<\/span><\/a> (often taking years), leaving individuals in a dangerous no-man\u2019s-land \u2013 with widespread reports of Afghans being <\/span>killed and disappeared<\/span><\/a> by the Taliban. For those who do manage to leave Afghanistan, the risk of <\/span>deportation<\/span><\/a> looms large.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years after the collapse, Afghan civic actors \u2013 from <\/span>activists<\/span><\/a> and educators to doctors and <\/span>nurses<\/span><\/a> \u2013 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 <\/span>limbo<\/span><\/a>. 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\u2019s most significant resource: its people.<\/span><\/p>\n

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When external actors assume control over knowledge production on Afghanistan, they frequently reinforce biased, oversimplified and reductive narratives rooted in\u00a0 neo-colonial\u00a0 stereotypes. This includes portraying Afghans as inherently backward, resistant to reform, or prone to gender oppression and\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0\u2013 <\/i>Afghan scholar in exile, February 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n

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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 \u2013 across humanitarian, security, and political domains \u2013 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.)\u00a0 to create the right conditions and incentives for stability.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/strong> as a modest first step to preserve, sustain and amplify Afghan expertise and knowledge in order to better understand Afghanistan\u2019s interlocking crises, and provide analysis that can inform creative actions in the short-term and help shape future prospects for a <\/span>more stable and pluralistic Afghanistan in the long-term.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Aims of the Afghanistan Research Network<\/h4>\n