Democracy, Ethnic Conflict and Peace in Afghanistan

This book analyses ethnic conflict, peace, and democracy in Afghanistan, with a particular focus on the Hazara peoples struggles during the 2001-2021 era.

Ethnicity shapes everything in Afghanistan, its state, its political structures and social institutions. This volume aims to evaluate how ethnicity shapes politics in Afghanistan and focuses on the some of the aspects of the Hazara people’s struggles to reach sustainable peace with justice in Afghanistan. It develops a new framework to better understand that ethnicity is not just a ‘politically sensitive issue’ but defines how politics is being conducted; in that sense, the ‘how’ of Afghanistan’s politics along ethnic divisions is re-conceptualised, problematised, and contextualised. The book puts forward a nuanced argument by analytically distinguishing between and empirically testing political and social behaviours, perspectives, and practices in relation to ethnicity, which is increasingly gaining in salience and informing intercommunal relationships in Afghanistan. This approach provides significant new insights into non-traditional political contexts.

This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict, Asian politics, critical security studies, and International Relations.

Arif Sahar is a research fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. He holds a PhD from University College London on the political economy of education and international development in Afghanistan. He is the co-author of Reconceptualizing Securitization in Afghanistan: Ethnicity, Social Identity, and Higher Education post-2001 (Routledge, 2024).