Publications by Year: 2003

The opportunities for engaging the Afghan public in the process of constitution building and legal reform are quickly disappearing. Decades of war have left the legal system, and its legal culture, in ruins. The project of constitutional and legal reform will be central to the success of reconstruction efforts. For the first time, Afghan legal professionals, civil society leaders, and other groups have the chance to engage in the rebuilding of their country’s legal foundations: both to stabilize a still-insecure country, and to transform their society in more long-lasting ways. However, as the Constitutional Loya Jirga approaches, many key questions regarding the nature of the new Afghan legal order remain, and many Afghans are beginning to feel that they have been left out of the process. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) is in an ideal position to engage civil society groups and legal professionals in wider debate about the protection and integration of human rights standards in the new legal system. Its mandate includes the harmonization of international human rights standards with national law, and perhaps more importantly, the Commission enjoys access to a nation-wide constituency of individuals and groups who support the central government and the modernization of Afghan law. This roundtable report, which presents topics and analysis from a roundtable co-hosted by AIHRC and the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University and entitled Human Rights and Rule of Law: Constitutional and Legal Reform, attempts to capture the outcomes of one such effort at engagement and discussion. This Roundtable was one of the first such meetings in Kabul to engage a broad representation of civil society leaders, legal professionals, and Loya Jirga delegates from provinces outside Kabul. In total, there were about forty participants, with half of the group from Kabul and half from other cities and towns. The Roundtable was led by members of the AIHRC, with attendance and participation by members of the Judicial Reform Commission. A series of background papers in Dari was drafted by HPCR (in close consultation with members of the AIHRC) prior to the Roundtable, and made available to the participants along with a copy of President Hamid Karzai’s most recent decree on the Constitutional Loya Jirga and a paper on legal reform in Afghanistan.

The purpose of this report is to present the results of a youth roundtable on constitutional and legal reform, hosted February 5-6, 2003, by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) and co-organized by the Afghanistan Youth Center (AYC). This roundtable discussion, entitled “The Future of the Afghan Legal System: Perspectives from the Young Generation,” was held at the Khyber Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. The roundtable was organized as one of a series of activities aimed at enriching the information environment in which legal reform decisions are made in Afghanistan by the Afghanistan Transitional Administration (ATA), the Drafting Committee of the Constitutional Commission, the Judicial Reform Commission, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), and the international community of donor nations. The current publication reflects further research and observation in the months of February through June 2003. It is hoped that many of the views expressed by the participants will serve as an example of the types of frank and open conversations on sensitive issues that can and should take place in the critical months leading to the Constitutional Loya Jirga in October 2003.

This essay reviews recent research on the relationships between economies and violent conflict. The type of economic policies that governments choose plays a significant role in determining the likelihood of conflict. Policies that induce conflict may result from deliberate decisions to weaken state institutions so that leaders can more easily enrich themselves. Sometimes however conflict may result from attempts to increase economic efficiency. There is for example ample anecdotal evidence about how the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment programs of the 1980’s and 1990’s spawned civil conflicts. This review however has found no systematic support linking structural adjustment to war. It begins by considering the economic factors that make some societies susceptible to conflict. One of the main factors is poverty, though this is mostly a feature in civil wars, not international ones. Economic growth is also associated with lower levels of conflict. Thus, policies that aim to promote growth in developing countries are, in effect, also likely to act as agents for conflict prevention. However, although wealth reduces the chances of conflict, the rise in global economic prosperity throughout the 20th Century has corresponded with an increase rather than a fall in the number of civil wars. This is likely due to the rise in other conflict-inducing factors, such as population levels, and the fact that global growth has been unbalanced. Another feature of economies that is often related to levels of conflict is trade. There is strong evidence that countries that trade with each other are less likely to fight each other, though no comparable work has yet been Also considered is whether violent conflict is caused by undertaken on the effects of internal trade. economic inequality. Statistical research has not found evidence for such a relationship, though that may be because researchers are not working with the right data. While qualitative studies suggest that inequality between regions or groups – known as “horizontal inequality” – is what matters for violent conflict, econometric research has used a measure of “overall inequality” – that is, inequality between individuals irrespective of their group membership The two types of inequality need not be in any way correlated. Also covered in this essay is research that has been undertaken on the ways in which economies function once violent conflicts have broken out, including attempts to quantify the economic costs of conflicts. Some conflicts reduce the levels of investment within zones where fighting takes place; others spur technological innovation and growth. Different studies have tried to estimate aggregate costs and benefits of conflict, using a model of economic production that uses information on levels and rates of change of physical capital, population, human capital, and “total factor productivity.” No study however has yet measured the aggregate costs that arise from all these different channels. And while recent work has focused much on looting activities of groups there has not been much work studying the effects those activities have on economic producers. The ways in which economies are structured is also found to matter. Countries that depend on the sale of primary commodities, for example, are more likely to have wars. In particular the role of natural resources, such as oil and diamonds, has been widely discussed but there is a lack of consensus on the nature of their relationship to conflict. Researchers at the World Bank suggest that natural resources lead to wars because greedy citizens take up arms to capture them. But there are alternative explanations that are at least as plausible. These explanations suggest alternative policy responses on the part of governments and international organizations. Researchers have also studied the economic behavior of different groups during conflicts. Many have focused on ways rebel groups finance themselves. Some rebels do it by gaining control of natural resources, others are supported financially in part by emigrant populations (although this link is still poorly understood) and from third party sources such as foreign governments. Agricultural production is often as important for rebel financing as natural resources, although it is largely ignored by policy makers. The requirements for financing and the form of financing depend however on the relations between rebel groups and civilian populations. When rebels have popular support, they may benefit from donations in cash or in kind. Otherwise, they may rely on extortion. Unfortunately however, research is relatively sparse on the different ways rebels relate to civilian populations even though such variation is likely to have implications for financing, for forms of peace settlements and for war duration. Some political scientists have tried to distinguish between different types of natural resources in order to explore the mechanisms that link resources to conflict. Their research distinguishes between different commodities based on dimensions such as the extent to which production is centralized, the geographic distances between zones of production and the seat of government, and the extent to which trade in the resource is legal. It has also been argued that the institutional capacity of governments alters relationships between natural resources and conflict. These different lines of research have been developed through the examination of case study evidence, but their conclusions have not been tested using statistical techniques.