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Charles Tilly and promoting democracy in the "graveyard of the empires" : interpersonal trust networks, categorical inequalities and autonomous clusters of power in Afghanistan

University of British Columbia

This thesis is concerned with illuminating our understanding of the struggles of democracy in Afghanistan through examining some of its obscure, conflicting and neglected dimensions. It utilizes Charles Tilly’s conceptual framework on democratization to postulate that, in order to entrench and sustain the fledgling Afghan democracy and its political institutions, three necessary processes of democratization will have to concurrently take place. These essential dynamics, or alterations as Tilly would like to refer to them, are, in the context of this paper, carving out a political space for, and integrating, the faith-based Civil Society Organizations as the local interpersonal trust networks; insulating public politics from gender-based categorical inequalities; and, de-warlordizing the Afghan politics as a way of decreasing the autonomy of these centres of power. The normative perspective underlying this thesis is that democracy promotion could work in Afghanistan and certain adjustments, mainly Tilly’s alterations, could create conditions that would be conducive to the promotion of democracy in the country.

Text

2013-08-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43279

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/