Anna Larson – författare

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, researchers, policymakers, and the media have failed to consider the long-term implications of the country's post-conflict elections. Based on fieldwork in provinces across the country and interviews with more than seven hundred candidates, officials, community leaders, and voters, this book builds an in-depth portrait of Afghanistan's recent elections as experienced by individuals and communities, while revealing how the elections have in fact actively contributed to instability, undermining the prospects of democracy in Afghanistan. Merging political science with anthropology, Noah Coburn and Anna Larson document how political leaders, commanders, and the new ruling elite have used elections to further their own interests and deprive local communities of access to political opportunities. They retrace presidential, parliamentary, and provincial council elections over the past decade and expose the role of international actors in promoting the polls as one-off events, detached from the broader political landscape.This approach to elections has allowed existing local powerholders to solidify their grip on resources and opportunities, derailing democratization processes and entrenching a deeper disengagement from central government. Western powers, Coburn and Larson argue, need to reevaluate their most basic assumptions about elections, democracy, and international intervention if they hope to prevent similar outcomes in the future.

As a result of a 20-year international military campaign, Afghanistan has been at the centre of global academic and policy debates on intervention and statebuilding. Yet these debates have often been piecemeal, ahistorical and centred in western logics, interests and concerns. This volume provides a new, critical compilation of scholarly contributions from emerging and established Afghan and international scholars that defy these trends. The volume targets a new generation of students and scholars of Afghanistan– a generation looking critically and retrospectively at the longest military intervention in US history. This is a readership well-attuned to the complexities of the Afghan context and the dilemmas of international engagement more broadly. Beyond criticism of a failed intervention and the often reductive analytical tools that have been used to assess it, the chapters in this collection provide novel epistemological approaches to conceptions of power and authority in Afghanistan. Breaking new ground, Power and Authority gives voice to and consolidates in one volume the first generation of influential Afghan scholars to emerge after forty years and offers them the opportunity to speak with (and back to) those who have come before.