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Abstract
This article looks at the interactions between the officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s mission in Afghanistan and the heads of the Afghan Ministry of Refugees in the mid-2000s. It examines the rationales that guide officials at both the UNHCR and the ministry, as a way of unpacking the politics of state capacity building in post-2001 Afghanistan. The first section looks at the tense relationship between the two bodies from the point of view of UN officials, who strive to redress a ministry portrayed as ‘incapable’. By looking in turn at the fundaments of the political legitimacy of the Afghan state, at how international intervention transforms the Afghan political arena, and at Afghanistan’s position in global power relations, the following sections identify three rationales that can be ascribed to ministry officials, namely reconciling internal and external state legitimacy, strategic resource tapping and resistance to inter-state hegemony. From its standpoint at the juncture between an ‘external’ and a ‘local’ institution, the article ultimately stresses the importance of gaining epistemological distance from the peace building project in order to consider ‘local’ actors as full political actors.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Alessandro Monsutti, Davide Rodogno, Tobias Marchal and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the support of a Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship that allowed me to finalise this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 United Nations, Agenda for Peace.
2 Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States.
3 A visit to the library of the Glass palace in 2009 allowed me to see the prominent place given to this book within the United Nations. In the introduction we read: ‘They simply want their states, economies, and societies to function. […] It is the dysfunctional state that stands between them and a better life […]. This problem – the failed state – is at the heart of a worldwide systemic crisis that constitutes the most serious challenge to global stability in the new millennium. […] A consensus is now emerging that only sovereign states – by which we mean states that actually perform the functions that make them sovereign – will allow human progress to continue’. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States, 2–4.
4 Goodhand and Sedra, “Rethinking Liberal Peacebuilding”; and Suhrke, When More Is Less.
5 This study is part of a wider research project on the intervention of the UNHCR in the Afghan crisis; see Scalettaris, “La Fabrique du Gouvernement International des Réfugiés.” This work built on an embedded ethnography within the offices of the UNHCR in Geneva and Kabul, where the researcher was at once both a practitioner working as reporting officer, and a researcher observing the daily functioning of an international organisation. For a discussion of the author’s positionality and its methodological implications, see Scalettaris, “L’ethnographe Embarqué et la Pensée Institutionnelle du HCR.”
6 See for instance Berger, “From Nation-Building to State-Building”; Chandler, Empire in Denial; and Zaum, Sovereignty Paradox.
7 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building,” 763.
8 Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; and Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
9 Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Afghanistan National Development Strategy.
10 UNHCR, Finding Durable Solutions for Refugees and Displacement, 2007.
11 Names have been changed to protect the identity of the UNHCR and ministry officials.
12 Local council.
13 Liser, Moving Forward? 2006.
14 In 2007, the UNHCR was present in Afghanistan with a central office, 10 field offices, and some 600 employees. The ministry had almost twice as many employees distributed between the central ministry and 34 provincial departments.
15 He joined the guerrilla movement that fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
16 Recent policy documents allow us to infer that 10 years later, the relationship between the two institutions has not changed much: the UNHCR still has a prominent role in national refugee policies and in crafting the ministry’s official documents. See Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees.
17 Biersteker, “State, Sovereignty and Territory.”
18 Bayart, L’État en Afrique.
19 This section draws on the work of Roy, Afghanistan, Islam et Modernité Politique; Roy, Afghanistan: La Difficile Reconstruction; and Barfield, Afghanistan. A Cultural and Political History.
20 For a theoretical approach to the notion of extraversion see Bayart, “Africa in the World.”
21 The qawm constitutes a primary local group to which one belongs by birth, and which establishes a stable, informal network of loyalty and solidarity. See Roy, Afghanistan: La Difficile Reconstruction, 22.
22 Schetter, “L’ordre Loin de L’État.”
23 Wilde and Mielke, Order, “Stability, and Change in Afghanistan”; and Giustozzi and Orsini, “Centre–Periphery Relations in Afghanistan.”
24 Mukhopadhyay, “Disguised Warlordism and Combatanthood in Balkh.”
25 Sharan, “Dynamics of Elite Networks.”
26 Barfield, Afghanistan. A Cultural and Political History, 119.
27 On this point see also Barakat and Larson, “Fragile States: A Donor-Serving Concept?”
28 Adelkhah, “Guerre et terre en Afghanistan.”
29 Barfield, Afghanistan. A Cultural and Political History, 205.
30 These have been extensively documented and commented on; see for instance Barfield, Afghanistan. A Cultural and Political History, 284, 331; Giustozzi and Orsini, “March towards Democracy?”; Roy, Afghanistan: La Difficile Reconstruction; and Suhrke, When More Is Less.
31 On this point see also Suhrke, When More Is Less; and Monsutti, “Fuzzy Sovereignty.”
32 Giustozzi, “March towards Democracy?”; and Suhrke, When More Is Less.
33 See for instance Bierschenk, Chauveau, and de Sardan, Courtiers en Développement.
34 Monsutti, “Fuzzy Sovereignty,” 582–3.
35 Randeria, “State of Globalization.”
36 Fisher, “When It Pays to Be a ‘Fragile State.’”
37 Scalettaris, “La Fabrique du Gouvernement International des Réfugiés”; and UNHCR, Global Appeal, 261.
38 See Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil; Coll, Ghost Wars; and Rubin, “Peace Building and State-Building in Afghanistan.”
39 Chandler, Empire in Denial; and Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars.
40 Nay, “Théorie des ‘États Fragiles’”; and Zaum, Sovereignty Paradox.
41 Donini, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.”
42 Monsutti, “Fuzzy Sovereignty.”
43 Pineu, Pedagogy of Security.
44 Donini, Humanitarian Agenda 2015.
45 Scalettaris, “La Fabrique du Gouvernement International des Réfugiés.”
46 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
47 Chimni, “Third World Approaches to International Law”.
48 In her analysis of French–Moroccan negotiations around readmissions, El Qadim, “Postcolonial Challenges to Migration Control,” offers another analysis of the agency and practices of resistance of Moroccan officials.
49 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 18.
50 Barnett and Zürcher, “Peacebuilder’s Contract.”
51 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Giulia Scalettaris
Giulia Scalettaris is an Assistant Professor in political science at the University of Lille and a visiting fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She received her PhD in 2013 from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) with a thesis on the UNHCR intervention in the Afghan crisis. Since then, she has continued to work on the global refugee regime and humanitarianism, with a strong focus on aid institutions.