Internal self-determination and the struggle of minorities in Afghanistan: between legal entitlement and political tension
The return of the Taliban to power in 2021 did not merely mark a change of government with the overthrowing of the fledgling democratic system; whatever fragile achievements people had made in their socio-cultural, political and economic lives drastically collapsed. Afghanistan has never been an easy place to govern across ethnic lines. Ethnic minority communities whose coexistence has always been negotiated, never assumed, spent two decades after 2001 within an imperfect and corrupt constitutional order but, despite everything, were formally recognized as having equal participation. That recognition collapsed, and what replaced it after the Taliban takeover is a government composed almost entirely of Pashtun men, dominated by theological decrees rather than popular consent.
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