Policing Afghanistan

Description

Policing is not a popular topic of serious scholarly research. Although a vast literature on policing exists, it is mostly technical in nature and only rarely analytical. Even the police forces of Western Europe and North America have rarely been investigated in depth as far as their history and functioning goes. In particular, the politics of policing, its political economy, have been largely neglected.

This book is a rare in-depth study of a police force in a developing country which is also undergoing a bitter internal conflict, further to the post-2001 external intervention in Afghanistan. Policing Afghanistan discusses the evolution of the country’s police through its various stages but focuses in particular on the last decade.

The authors review the ongoing debates over the future shape of Afghanistan’s police, but seek primarily to analyse the way Afghanistan is policed relative to its existing social, political and international constraints. Giustozzi and Isaqzadeh have observed the development of the police force from its early stages, starting from what was a rudimentary, militia-based, police force prior to 2001. This is a book about how the police really work in such a difficult environment, the nuts and bolts approach, based on first hand research, as opposed to a description of how the Afghan police are institutionally organised and regulated.

Reviews

‘This is the first serious, comprehensive and convincing account of how policing in Afghanistan really works. Giustozzi and Isaqzadeh’s impressive study of the political dynamics of Afghan policing extends the police-studies agenda and is essential reading for anyone interested in the political economy – or reform – of policing.’ — Alice Hills, Chair of Conflict and Security, University of Leeds, and author of Policing Post-Conflict Cities

‘Policing Afghanistan is the most comprehensive account to date of the history of policing in Afghanistan, especially of the critically important and yet highly problematic post-2001 efforts to rebuild an effective police force in Afghanistan. The book contains a wealth of details about the structure and organization of the police, recruitment and retention issues, and the various reform efforts of the past decade. The most useful contribution of the book, however, is that it looks at policing not simply from a technocratic perspective, which other studies of police reform efforts in Afghanistan have tended to do, but as an inherently political task. By placing police reform efforts in their political context, and examining the political economy of policing, this study provides a much clearer and compelling explanation for the successes and many more failures of internationally-driven police reform efforts in Afghanistan.’ — Andrew Wilder, Director of Afghanistan and Pakistan Programs, United States Institute of Peace, and author of Cops or Robbers? The Struggle to Reform the Afghan National Police

‘The reconstruction of the Afghan police, which lies at the heart of domestic security, is a crucial example of how a wrong priority can prevail from the outset, as this book impressively illustrates. … it not only provides a differentiated analysis of the current status of the project “rebuilding of police” in Afghanistan, but includes locally collected data and detailed examples of political actors’ logics in the country, which are rarely discussed in a general national overview. … Worth reading for both those who intend to gain a deeper knowledge of the complex field of Afghan politics and those who have an interest in topics such as intervention policies or police reform in general.’ — International Affairs

Author(s)

Mohammed Isaqzadeh holds an MPhil from Oxford University and teaches at the American University in Kabul. He is co-author of a paper on Afghanistan’s paramilitary policing.