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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Afghanistan: Why Has Violence Replaced Political Power?

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The hypothesis from which Chap. 4 stems, and which I will try to confirm through this article, is that in Afghanistan it has been the international factors (albeit interacting with internal dynamics) which have had a particular hand in intensifying the conflicts and the process of State decomposition. On top of the underlying and undeniable structural weakness and external vulnerability of the Afghan State (a matter addressed in sects 4.1 and 4.2), the international interventions from the Afghan-Soviet war to the 2001 invasion, the lack of interest shown by the international community in consolidating peace in Afghanistan during the 1990s, and especially the numerous errors made by the international community led by the EU in the past decade, and which began with the invasion at the end of 2001, have all contributed to the constant decline in the country conditions (a thesis developed in the central part of this work: sects 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6). Among other things, these factors have generated an environment ripe for the slow, progressive substitution of politics for violence which is one of the major obstacles today facing any attempts to reconstruct the country. In this sense, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the distinction between political power and violence could serve as a basis for reflection about the possible (and doubtless difficult) ways out of the current situation in Afghanistan, through a recuperation of the political field, in the most noble sense of the term, as a way of overcoming violence through communication; a question which is addressed further in the final section of this work.