March towards democracy? The development of political movements in Afghanistan

Antonio Giustozzi

Central Asian Survey, 2013, vol. 32, issue 3, 318-335

Abstract: Although the post-2001 period in Afghanistan has been hailed as a return to an earlier process of democratic opening that was interrupted in the early 1970s, a comparison of the development of political movements up to 1978 and then after 2001 highlights important differences. Until the late 1960s, Afghan political parties were mainly focused on influencing a supposedly enlightened leadership towards faster modernization of the country. Their disillusion was beginning to push them towards the development of forms of organization which could mobilize sections of the population on their behalf, even if tentatively so. Little comparable effort was noticeable after 2001, when parties big and small, seemed intent mainly on securing a position from which to develop a following based on the distribution of patronage. It could be argued that the availability of resources on a large scale following international intervention in 2001 drove the Afghan political system in a direction quite different from the path which was initially embarked upon in the 1960s.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02634937.2013.835197 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ccasxx:v:32:y:2013:i:3:p:318-335

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ccas20

DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2013.835197

Access Statistics for this article

Central Asian Survey is currently edited by Raphael Jacquet

More articles in Central Asian Survey from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().