Democracy, Liberalism, and Polycentricism in Afghanistan

Drawing on political economy and theory, Democracy, Liberalism, and Polycentricism in Afghanistan explores how pluralism has shaped political life in Afghanistan—and how the institutions built to govern the country repeatedly failed to accommodate it. It brings scholars together across disciplines to examine Afghanistan’s deep diversity of ethnic, religious, and political ways of life, and the indigenous practices of self-governance that long managed that diversity from the ground up. Successive state-building projects—Marxist, Islamist, and liberal alike—sought to impose a singular vision of good on a society defined by difference. Through the lenses of polycentrism and the practical compromise strand of liberalism, the contributors trace how authority distributed across multiple centers—customary councils, religious institutions, and local governments—shaped political order, how strongmen and patronage networks captured the state’s resources, and why centralizing institutions so often undermined indigenous self-governance.