Transitional Peace Building in Afghanistan: Problems and Prospects

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - by Professor William Maley, Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy
 

PPresented by: Professor William Maley, Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy. Moderator/Discussant: Dr Ali Wardak (AHDR 2007) Author, Centre for Policy and Human Development (CPHD). Date, Time and Place: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at CPHD.

Professor William Maley is Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University. He is author of The Afghanistan Wars (2002) and Rescuing Afghanistan (2006); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (1991), Afghanistan’s Political and Constitutional Development (2003), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (1992); edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (1998); and co-edited The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989) and From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States (2003).

Students and lecturers of Kabul University and members of international community attending the lecture organized by CPHD

Afghanistan since 2001 provides an instructive and in some respects sobering illustration of the complexities of transitional peace building. This lecture examines the context within which the process of change inaugurated in Bonn in December 2001 has been located, and identifies both some key strengths and some unavoidable limitations of that process. It concludes by identifying some of the developments which have undermined the optimism that surrounded the Bonn Agreement, and by offering some observations on steps that might usefully be taken to prevent Afghanistan from lapsing back into serious disorder