Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi1
1The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Biography:
Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Initiative for Peacebuilding. His research focuses on the dynamics of peace and violence in conflict and post-conflict states in the Middle East and South Asia. He conducts ethnographic and historical research to study how international power politics, as well as local dynamics in the form of contentious politics and civil society, maintain and transform peace, conflict and social justice.
He completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 2018, where his doctoral thesis examined the dynamics of contentious politics in the context of the international intervention in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2017.
Abstract:
This paper examines how the crises of, and the challenges to, liberal international order manifests in contestation over the nature and functions of civil society in Afghanistan. While the US intervention aimed to promote liberal values and empower civil society, it also inadvertently undermined it by subordinating civil society promotion to short-term security objectives. The development of civil society was further undermined by the August 2021 return of the Taliban to power, which was partly facilitated by shifts in US policies away from liberal values, and negotiation and a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in 2020. Subsequently, while the Taliban regime has systematically repressed civil liberties, Afghanistan’s civil society has emerged as a defender of liberal values, resisting the Taliban’s repressive regime and advocating for universal human rights and democratic freedoms. This contestation between the Taliban and civil society shed light on both the local and global contestation over the liberal international order, demonstrating how local actors and their agency shape norm contestation and localisation. The paper examines this dynamic by analysing the impact of the US intervention and withdrawal on local civil society, the Taliban’s restrictions on civil liberties, and the civil society advocacy for global norms. It concludes by discussing the implications of local contestation, particularly in the context of rising authoritarianism and the resurgence of nationalism.