Since its inception as a separate political entity in 1747, Afghanistan has been embroiled in almost perpetual warfare but has never been ruled directly by the military. From initial expansionist military campaigns to involvement in defensive, civil, and internal consolidation campaigns, the Afghan military until the mid-19th century remained mainly a combination of tribal forces and smaller organized units. The central government, however, was only able to gain tenuous monopoly over the use of violence throughout the country by the end the 19th century. The military as well as the Afghan society remained largely illiterate and generally isolated from the prevailing global political and ideological trends until the middle of the 20th century.
The politicization of the Afghan military began in very small numbers after World War II, with Soviet-inspired communism gaining the largest foothold. Officers associated with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan were instrumental in two successful coups d’état in the country. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, ending the country’s sovereignty and ushering in a period of conflict that has continued into the third decade of the 21st century in varying degrees. In 2001, the United States led an international invasion of the country, which was followed by efforts to organize smaller, professional Afghan national defense forces, which remained largely apolitical and became the country’s most effective and trusted governmental institution. However, designed by foreign forces to support foreign goals, they disintegrated when left to defend the country independently against the Taliban in 2021. The Taliban may represent a new phenomenon in Afghanistan, that of having a politicized militarized force.
Article
Afghanistan: Martial Society Without Military Rule
Amin Tarzi
Article
Evaluating Success and Failure in Crisis Management
Allan McConnell
Crises and disasters come in many shapes and sizes. They range from global pandemics and global financial crises to tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanic ash clouds, bushfires, terrorist attacks, critical infrastructure failures and food contamination episodes. Threats may be locally isolated such as an explosion at a local fireworks factory, or they may cascade across multiple countries and sectors, such as pandemics. No country is immune from the challenge of managing extraordinary threats, and doing so out of their comfort zone of routine policy making. The crisis management challenge involves managing threats ‘on the ground’, as well as the political fallout and societal fears.
Populist and journalistic commentary frequently labels crisis management initiatives as having either succeeded or failed. The realities are much more complex. Evaluators confront numerous methodological challenges. These include the careful consideration of multiple and often competing outcomes, differing perceptions, issues of success for whom, and gray areas stemming from shortfalls and lack of evidence, as well as variations over time. Despite such complexity, some key themes appear continually across evaluations, from internal reviews to royal commissions and accident inquiries. These pertain to the ways in which evaluations can be shaped heavily or lightly by political agendas, the degree to which evaluating organizations are able to open up, the degree to which gray areas and shortfalls are stumbling blocks in producing findings, and the challenge of producing coherent investigative narratives when many storylines are possible. Ultimately, evaluating crisis initiatives is “political” in nature because it seeks to provide authoritative evaluations that reconcile multiple views, from experts and lawyers to victims and their families.
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The Inclusion-Moderation Thesis: India’s BJP
Lars Tore Flåten
In 1925, the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded. The main aim of the RSS was to make India into a nation state defined according to Hindu cultural and religious values, which in the RSS version reflected a distinct high-caste outlook. Internal enemies, namely Muslims, Christians, and Marxists, had no place in such a state. This ideology goes under the name Hindutva, which can be translated as Hinduness. Due to the large-scale and religiously based violence experienced in the final stages of its freedom struggle, independent India adopted democracy and secularism as its foundational values. Hindu nationalist parties were present, but never influential in the first decades after independence. This circumstance was about to change in the 1980s, as the newly founded Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with strong links to the RSS, decided to mobilize on the Ayodhya issue. According to the BJP, the Ayodhya temple had been demolished by the Muslim ruler, Babur, and replaced with a mosque. The time had come to rebuild the temple.
This campaign catapulted the BJP onto the political scene in India. The strategy, however, was not without its flaws, and the weaknesses connected to the BJP’s Ayodhya campaign summed up the party’s main challenges. It has been difficult for the BJP to promote the existence of a nationwide Hindu identity in heterogeneous India, characterized by religious pluralism, different regional political cultures, and caste divisions. Particularly caste has proved difficult for the BJP, since the party is associated with high-caste values. Moreover, the way in which the BJP has utilized anti-Muslim rhetoric and campaigns has alienated potential alliance partners. The BJP has managed to overcome most of these challenges and was elected to power at the national level in 1998 and then again in 2014. In addition, the party governs many different states. During several national election campaigns, the BJP has actually chosen to background the most contentious issues in order to attract alliance partners. Instead, the party has conveyed its message of Hindu cultural unity in more subtle ways, most prominently through educational reforms. The BJP has also managed to adapt to regional variations and conveys its ideology in different ways throughout India. The landslide victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP in the 2014 elections represents a new phase in the history of the party. With a majority of its own, one could expect that the BJP would implement its Hindu nationalist agenda. For the most part, Modi has kept some degree of distance from Hindutva. However, through a division of labor, it appears that Modi has left the Hindutva agenda to the states governed by the BJP as well to the well-organized and influential Hindu nationalist movement.
Article
The Legitimation of Repression in Autocracies
Maria Josua
In research on authoritarianism, both legitimation and repression have received growing attention since the late 2000s. However, these two strategies of political rule do not form separate pillars of power; they are interlinked and affect each other. Autocrats not only rule with an iron fist, but they also seek to legitimize their use of repression vis-à-vis at least some of their citizens and the outside world. These legitimizing discourses are part of political communication in autocracies and can be studied using the approach of framing. So far, few researchers of the protest–repression nexus have studied how protesters are being framed by officials in autocracies.
The communication of repression varies widely across autocracies. Authoritarian incumbents differ in their degree of openness vs. opacity, impacting also on how they publicize, admit to, or conceal certain forms of repression. When choosing to justify acts of repression, multiple factors influence which types of justification are used. One decisive factor is against which targets repression is employed. In framing the targets of repression in a certain way, autocratic elites pursue a twin strategy in that they seek to attain the approval of certain audiences and to deter potential or actual dissidents. Furthermore, justifications diverge regarding which actors use them and towards which audiences. Past experiences and regime characteristics also impact on how repression is justified.
This research program offers great potential for studying state–society relations in autocracies. It cuts across research on political violence, authoritarian legitimation, and political communication. For understanding the persistence of autocracies in times of contention, it is an important piece in the puzzle of authoritarian survival strategies illuminating the “dark side” of legitimation.
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Political Contempt and Religion
Nathan C. Walker
A society’s political and legal treatment of religion is a distinct indicator of the health of a democracy. Consequently, high levels of political and legal contempt for religion in the United States can be an indicator that partners in American democracy may be going through a divorce. By drawing upon studies that measure voter attitudes and behaviors, as well as research that tracks the levels of social hostilities and violence toward religion, students of democracy see into two of society’s most revealing mirrors: political rhetoric and the nation’s laws. These reflections can unveil powerful questions about the true character of a nation: will democracy rule from a place of contempt for the religious other, or from a state of passive political tolerance, or from a constitutional commitment to actively protect the rights of those with whom we disagree? Theories of political tolerance and psychological studies of contempt prove helpful in examining contemporary levels of religious animosity in politics and law. The Religious Contempt Scale, as introduced in this essay, gauges a society’s willingness to tolerate the religious other. When special attention is given to the frequency and degrees of severity of expressions of contempt, it becomes clear that contempt has political utility: to motivate the intolerant to gain access to power and, in turn, to motivate those who are intolerant of intolerance to remove them.
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The Politics of Crisis Terminology
Allan McConnell
The politics of crisis terminology is rarely examined directly. Crisis is an “umbrella,” under which resides a multitude of terms such as accidents, emergencies, fiascos, disasters, and catastrophes, as well as variations such as natural disasters, transboundary crises, and mega-crises. Yet the sheer diversity and frequent ambiguity among terms reflects the “politics” of how societies and political actors seek to cope with and address extreme events, which often pose a mixture of threat and opportunity. Central to an understanding is how (a) different terms are means of framing issues such as the scale and causes of the crisis, (b) crisis terms are part of governing strategies, and (c) nongovernmental actors (opposition parties, media, lobby groups, social movements, and citizens) can seek to influence government. A pivotal point in developing an understanding of crisis terminology is that rather bemoaning the lack of singular meanings for crisis and associated terms, or criticizing actors for “abuse” of the terms, one should recognize and accept that complex and contested crisis language and definitions are in themselves manifestations of politics in political societies.
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Religious Nationalism and Religious Influence
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Religious nationalism, or the fusion of religious and national identities and goals, is an increasingly salient aspect of nationalism. Rather than secular nationalism simply replacing religious identities and allegiances, religious and national identities coexist and even reinforce each other. Such religious nationalism becomes a powerful force in buttressing popular religiosity and attitudes, empowers religious organizations in influencing policy across a wide range of domains, and shapes the patterns of inter- and intra-state violence. The two implications of these findings are that we should invest in better measures and operationalization of religious nationalism and reconsider the logics of state- and nation-building.
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Religious Regulation in Autocracies
Lawrence C. Reardon
Unlike democracies, the stability and longevity of autocracies are solely dependent on the ability of the paramount leader to maintain and wield power effectively. Whether the autocracy is composed of an absolute monarch or a supreme authoritarian, religious, military, fascist, or communist leader, the autocrat strengthens legitimacy by controlling competing power centers within the state. Autocrats are both envious and fearful of organized religion’s ability to mobilize the citizenry. Whether dealing with large religious organizations or organized religious believers, autocrats can choose to implement negative religious regulations to control or eliminate foreign and domestic religious threats, positive religious regulations to co-opt religious powers, or transformative religious regulations to create new organizations that consolidate and maintain autocratic rule. Adopting an interest-based theoretical approach, the autocratic religious regulations of four countries (China, England, Italy, and Japan) are divided into three categories (negative, positive, and transformative religious regulations). Autocrats within the four countries adopted formal regulations to consolidate their hegemonic control over societal forces within and outside the state.
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Religious Regulation in China
Lawrence C. Reardon
Establishing a totalitarian state after 1949, Chinese Communist Party elites formulated religious regulations that ensured strong national security and guaranteed the Party’s hegemonic control of the state. The party state eliminated all foreign religious connections and established Party-controlled religious organizations to co-opt the five recognized official religious beliefs. By the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong prohibited all religious beliefs except in himself. As the post-totalitarianism of the 1980s evolved into consultative authoritarianism of the 1990s, Communist elites resurrected the Party-controlled religious organizations and implemented a new series of religious regulations in 1994 and 2005 that permitted the operation of officially recognized religions to strengthen moral standards and to supplement the state’s social welfare functions. Facing perceived challenges from foreign religions and fearing the growing popularity of religious belief, the party state adopted a third set of religious regulations in 2017 to strengthen Party hegemony.
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Religious Regulation: The Regulation of All Religion in a Country
Jonathan Fox
Countries can regulate both the majority religion and minority religions. Although most countries do both, the motivations and dynamics of these two types of regulation are distinct. The regulation, restriction, or control by a government of all religion in a country, including the majority religion, can take multiple forms. These include regulating (1) religion’s role in politics, (2) religious institutions and clergy, (3) religious practices, and (4) other aspects of religion. At least one form of religious regulation is engaged in by 95.5% of governments, and religious regulation is becoming more common over time. Regulating, restricting, and controlling religion is the norm worldwide regardless of world region, government type, and majority religion.
Multiple motivations exist for regulating, restricting, and controlling majority religions. (1) Some countries have secular or anti-religious national ideologies. (2) Some countries support religion, but countries that support a religion often also want to influence and control that religion. In fact, control is a nearly inevitable consequence of support. (3) Politicians often fear religion’s potential political power and seek to keep it in check. (4) Autocratic governments often seek to restrict any aspect of civil culture they cannot control, and this includes religion. On the other hand, regulation is costly. It requires resources that can be used elsewhere, so regulating religion represents a decision to use resources despite these costs.
Article
Zapatistas and New Ways of Doing Politics
Richard Stahler-Sholk
Scholars of Latin American social movements since the 1980s have sought to explain the apparent upswing in cycles of contentious politics, the innovative characteristics of these new movements, and variations in how they interact with or sidestep conventional institutional politics. The regional context for these developments is very different from the postmaterialist conditions said to have spawned European “new social movements” since the 1970s revolving around identity and values, such as ecology, peace, gay rights, and women’s movements. Relevant causal factors for Latin America’s contemporary movements include popular reaction against neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions and brokered by national governments. Another factor was the transition from military authoritarianism in much of the region, inaugurating a struggle between political elites with a liberal-representative vision of democratization and social movements favoring radical/participatory democracy. The era of globalization also brought reexamination of the citizenship pact and of the hegemonic (mestizo) construction of the nation-state, fueling a reinvigoration of indigenous movements, some with their own cosmovisions of buen vivir (living well) that destabilized mainstream notions of the political. The interplay between party-electoral politics and grassroots movement activism took place against the backdrop of the “pink tide” of elected leftist governments, which swept much of the region in the first decade of the 21st century and subsequently appeared to recede. Throughout this period, scholars and activists alike debated whether fundamental change could best be achieved by movements pushing parties and governments to use state power to enact reforms or by movements themselves adopting radically horizontal and inclusive patterns of organizing—“new ways of doing politics”—that would transform society from below.
The January 1, 1994, Zapatista uprising among mostly Maya peasants in the poor southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, launched the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, became emblematic of new ways of doing politics from below. What began as a rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]) quickly morphed into a social movement that both criticized national and global power structures and sought to empower local communities through everyday practices of de facto autonomy. Negotiations with the state over indigenous rights and culture quickly broke down, but the Zapatistas proceeded anyway to develop their own structures of self-government, autonomous education, healthcare, justice, and agrarian and economic relations, among other innovative practices. The Zapatista movement continues to raise important issues such as the role of culture and identity in popular mobilization, the social spaces for organizing in an era of globalization, the new characteristics of movements that practice alternative forms of prefigurative politics, and the possibility of redefining power from below. Scholars of the Zapatista movement have also posed probing self-reflective questions about the adequacy of conventional definitions of politics and Western positivist epistemologies and about the need for decolonizing research in indigenous and other oppressed communities.
