Afghanistan

For Habiba and the approximately 600 local women vying for public sector jobs, the route to employment has been fraught with disappointment: Officials have been known to demand bribes of 50,000 Afghani ($850), for hiring female teachers.

In this newly published research, titled “Politics and Governance in Afghanistan: The case of Kandahar,” AREU’s Ashley Jackson provides an overview of sub-national governance in the southern province of Kandahar.

This special issue of Politis asia includes nine original articles and interviews from specialists from Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan discussing the isssues of cultural identity and nation-building.

Bengali classic ‘Deshe Bideshe’, which chronicles Afghan history and politics, translated into English. Written by Syed Mujtaba Ali in 1948, ‘Desh Bideshe’ is the only published eyewitness account of that tumultuous period by a non-Afghan.

Armanshahr Human rights and Civil Society, weekly newsletter

We all know that being a writer is hard. Being a woman writer, with all that industry bias and those glass ceilings out there, is even harder. But nothing can quite describe the daring, sometimes terrifying, experience of being a woman writer in Afghanistan

The previous Afghan government believed that America was crucial to solving this problem. Former President Karzai expected America to use its power to force Islamabad to abandon its support for terrorism.

The President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani has made good on his election promise and appointed Anisa Rassouli to be his country’s first female Supreme Court judge. She is the first Afghan woman to be given such an important legal job.

Beginning June 23, all of the main state bodies in Afghanistan will lose their constitutional basis. The Afghan Parliament’s term will end on June 22 with no new parliament in line to replace it due to the government’s failure to hold elections this past April.

Over the past ten years Afghanistan’s Constitution has been tested on several occasions, but how has it fared? As part of an AREU project to evaluate the Afghan Constitution, our latest paper examines the issue of the separation of powers under the current Constitution and finds that it suffers from flaws both on paper and in practice.