Stefan Schütte

Pastoralism, Power and Politics: Access to Pastures in Northern Afghanistan

This chapter explores the practice of nomadic pastoralism in contemporary Afghanistan and looks at how the geographies of access to pastures are shaped by asymmetric power relations and high degrees of tenure insecurity. The discussion is based on empirical fieldwork amongst Pashtun pastoralists based in the Chahar District of Kunduz Province, who seasonally migrate to the high pastures of Badakhshan. Their social and spatial practices are taken as examples of the constraints and opportunities that constitute pastoralism in Afghanistan today. The pastoral groups studied have shown enormous capacity to continuously adapt their mobility strategies in response to changing power structures, increased societal pressure and fluctuating economic opportunities. However, after 32 years of continuous warfare, the traumatic experiences of conflict and war, of power struggles and changes of authority, of insecurity and threats to survival, pastoralists today still strife for their rights to mobility and secure pasture access. Faced with changing rule systems and legal pluralism governing both the winter and spring pastures in Kunduz and the high pastures of Badakhshan around the environs of Lake Shewa, pastoralism in Afghanistan continues to be a highly insecure endeavour. The current situation of pastoral tenure insecurity is traced by reconstructing pastoral practices and mobility strategies as they are executed today, by looking at the governance structures that shape both mobility and pasture access and by examining the historical geographies of nomadic pastoralism as experienced by the group under study.

Linking Relief and Development in Pakistan-administered Kashmir Restoring Local Livelihoods and Economic Security in Earthquake-affected Areas

Abstract In response to the devastating earthquake that hit northern Pakistan on 8 October 2005, the German Red Cross (GRC), in partnership with the Economic Security Unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), implemented a complex livestock restocking program combined with structural interventions in the basic animal health sector. Livestock restocking, which was a new experience for both GRC and ICRC, indicates a shift from the relief operations that are traditionally the main domain of both organizations toward development approaches that aim to provide sustainable support for affected populations. The project activities are an example of an agencys move to facilitate a transition from relief measures to lasting development, with the aim of reducing the frequency, intensity, and impact of livelihood shocks, while simultaneously reducing the need for emergency relief. The question remains whether the projects rehabilitation efforts succeeded in connecting the end of relief with the establishment of sustainability in the livestock sector, including the support of local livestock production, processing, and marketing systems. Overall, the livestock intervention project helped restore rural livelihoods in a remote mountain area and heightened coping capacities in households that succeeded in making productive and sustainable use of the animals.

Informal (In)security in Urban Afghanistan

Poverty and insecurity in Afghan cities are intricately intertwined with conditions of “informality.” The term and the realities it describes refer to living situations in which basic needs and activities such as work, housing, and social security are unprotected by laws and standards. Immersion into such a convolution of informality determines the life of a majority among urban populations in Afghanistan and conveys a deep sense of insecurity for the urban poor. The paper looks at how rapid and unprecedented urban growth in Afghanistan goes along with rising levels of livelihood insecurity and explores how the urban poor cope with livelihood risks through a range of informal arrangements. Conceptually, the notion of “informal security regimes” helps capture informality as a coping strategy and how it relates to urban poverty in Afghanistan. Informed by extensive empirical fieldwork, the paper identifies different elements of the “informal security regime” in urban Afghanistan and explores their specific operations. The paper is mainly focused on the Afghan capital, Kabul, supplemented with evidence from other urban sites in Afghanistan.

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and womens oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on womens subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how womens agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.

The Baghlan Oasis in Transition—From Autocratic Modernisation to Contested Spaces

The Baghlan oasis is taken as a case in point to analyse the drying-up of a swampy, malaria-infested river basin in order to convert it into a “modern” agricultural production zone. The process was initiated by the Afghan kings in the first half of the twentieth century with the support of German planners and engineers, who engaged in establishing cotton and sugar production areas and the industrial processing of their crops. The implementation of modernist concepts in agricultural production made the oases of northern Afghanistan symbols of a future Afghanistan. This paper analyses the developments in the aftermath and focuses on the renaissance of similar concepts after 9/11 and the downfall of the Taliban. The transition from monarchy to republican rule, followed by subsequent turmoil and civil unrest, has affected the functioning of production in the river oases.

Peacebuilding and pasture relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the virtue of attempts to local peacebuilding around issues of pasturelands in Afghanistan. It looks at the value of local empirical research that aims to assess local pasture access regimes to inform peacebuilding approaches that build on local custom. Conceptually, it looks at state-society relations in Afghanistan and proposes the idea of expanding the state to literally encompass its localities, by turning local village councils into public service entities with ongoing responsibilities in pasture management and administration. The argument is anchored both in the technicalities of a peacebuilding approach exercised through the development practice in the context of liberal peace, and in a discussion of the nexus between the state and community that heeds local politics and power relations. The process is illustrated through empirical case studies of local peacebuilding in two villages. It is argued that turning marginal spaces into the state itself in an incremental learning-by-doing approach provides a feasible way forwards to start building peace in Afghanistan.

Violence and Belonging: Land, Love, and Lethal Conflict in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan

The Palas Valley in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan remains one of the least researched areas of the country. In fact, Are Knudsen’s fascinating account on violence, identity, belonging, and land relations among the Shin population, the majority ethnic group of the Palas, is the first in-depth study undertaken in that remote valley since Fredrik Barth paid a passing visit to the notoriously unruly Kohistan District of NWFP in the 1950s (Barth 1956). Inhabited and dominated by what Knudsen terms an ‘‘autocratic moral community’’ (p xvii) and an ‘‘autarchic political society’’ (p 29), the central concern of the book is to establish the meaning of violence, honor, and belonging for Palas villagers when they act upon self-imposed rules and social norms that have significance and are legitimate only within the community. Certainly, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the valley contributed to this specific situation; having never been conquered by more powerful groups and thus never having been directly exposed to colonial or any other foreign rule, the native Shin population developed a very specific understanding of morals, honor, and justice, grounded in a localized but orthodox version of Islam. This ambitious project builds on an ethnographic approach, and one has to commend the author for having managed to research a very sensitive subject in an exemplary and convincing fashion. Knudsen is able to uncover a real treasure of information and case study material that enlighten the reader about the detrimental consequences of maintaining one’s honor in a patriarchal egalitarian society; the social acceptance of violent behavior and even homicide; the ways in which honor and revenge threaten the livelihoods of people, households, and families involved in local conflicts; and the centrality of landed property as a common subject of dispute or as compensatory object. Knudsen starts his account of the Palas society and its conflicts by embedding his research in the wider anthropological debate on violence, before providing a crisp introduction to the research locale and its people. This chapter describes what we need to know about Palas’ history, its settlement and agricultural patterns, existing development efforts in the valley, and the levels of interaction with the Pakistani state and its authorities. Subsequently, the third chapter deals with land and land relations in the valley and sets the important context for what is to follow when introducing and analyzing the case studies. In this chapter, the author explains the way in which the current pattern of land ownership in the Palas valley has its roots in a traditional indigenous land tenure system called the ‘‘wesh.’’ This system worked as a ‘‘wealth levelling mechanism, reflecting the high value placed on social equality’’ (p 65), in that it periodically instituted a reallocation of the available land among the Shin. This also established a social stratification between those who are entitled to land allocation (ie the Shin), and those who are not (eg agricultural wage laborers from other groups). Further, being a part of the wesh reaffirmed the notion of belonging to the Palas and made access to landed property an important marker of social identity. The wesh in Palas ended by the beginning of the 20th century, and the last round of reallocations established a dispersed land tenure pattern that still exists today and is the source of many and often violent land disputes. Before going into the specific nature of those prevalent disputes, Knudsen proceeds to explain the human ecology of maize agriculture in the valley as well as the nature of combined mountain agriculture practiced by the Shin. Given the nature of mountain agriculture and transhumance, people follow a pattern of seasonal migration that spans different agro-ecological zones into distinct activity spaces. The maize growing zone in the most productive areas of the valley used to be the ‘‘locus of group solidarity, co-operation and commensality. It is now the scene of the most violent fights, brawls and homicides’’ (p 77). How did this happen? Apparently, the notions of honor and masculinity that often give rise to conflict are increasingly carried out by using land as a vehicle to exercise pressure on opponents. The means to do so is to exercise a ban on cultivation enforced through arms, threatening the livelihoods of the parties involved in conflict, and, in many cases, leading to expulsion from the valley when the parties involved cannot maintain an adequate defense. Knudsen presents rich ethnographic case study material to illustrate how conflicts evolve and continue, and how land is ‘‘central to the constitution of identity and confers on villagers a sense of belonging’’ (p 89). This notion is further elaborated in chapter five, ‘‘Being, Longing, and Belonging,’’ where being is ‘‘premised on being able and willing to defend landed property ... weapon in hand’’ (p 93). Land becomes a contentious object, an object for which one is willing to kill and be killed. Another source of violent conflict and homicide is illicit love affairs, which usually result in the killing of both man and woman. This is illustrated by two other case studies, where conflicts about illicit love evolved into land conflicts and cultivation bans imposed by the opposing parties. Further ethnographic eviMountainMedia Mountain Research and Development (MRD) An international, peer-reviewed open access journal published by the International Mountain Society (IMS) www.mrd-journal.org