Promoting Democracy under Conditions of State Fragility
By Hamish Nixon
Afghanistan faces an acute crisis with three inter-related dimensions: insurgency, opium, and dissatisfaction with the government and its international backers. Sustainable solutions to these challenges all require a long-term commitment to improved governance in Afghanistan.
Governance involves more than just government, and encompasses broad questions of how Afghan society and its international supporters may deliver public goods in the area of security, representation and welfare. Nevertheless, the state will have a central role in coordinating this delivery, and statebuilding is therefore the central concern for the country’s future.
The aid architecture to date has not been consistently oriented towards meeting this challenge, and changes are required both inside and outside the country to do so. The recent transition to an assistance framework based on the Afghanistan National Development Strategy and Afghanistan Compact presents opportunities to make these changes. However, this framework requires further elaboration to most effectively support governance-based solutions to the country’s challenges.
About the author: Hamish Nixon
Dr. Hamish Nixon is the governance researcher at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul, where he has worked since March 2005. He did his doctoral work on comparative peace processes at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He has studied and worked on post-conflict institutions in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. He would like to thank those who commented on earlier drafts of this essay, though all errors of fact and argument are his alone.