Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Prologue: No Small War -- 1. Mercenaries, Contractors, and Other Hired Guns -- 2. Nepalis at War -- 3. One Blast, Many Lives -- 4. Costs and Compensation -- 5. Manpower -- 6. Two Hundred Years of Gurkhas -- 7. "Who Will Be a Gurkha?" -- 8. Through the Colonial Looking Glass -- 9. The Labor of War -- 10. A Protective Government? -- 11. Of Roses and Revolutions -- 12. Economic Ottomans -- 13. Turkish Engineers and Other Heroes of the Intervention -- 14. Building an Empire? -- 15. Detained -- 16. Kidnapped -- 17. Hom Bahadur -- 18. The Boredom of Being Trafficked -- 19. Accountants at War -- 20. Classes and Genders at War -- 21. Returning Abroad -- 22. When You Can't Go Home -- 23. Where the War Went -- A Note on the Research -- Time Line of Relevant Dates -- Notes -- Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Surveying the intervention from above -- Intervening -- The exotic tribes of the intervention -- Before the invasion -- A new era? -- Contracting the intervention -- Climbing over the wall -- The merchant-warlord alternative -- Warlord density and its discontents -- How to host your own shura -- The pieces left behind

Contents -- Summary -- Introduction -- The Impact of Previous Elections -- Two Types of Electoral Fraud -- Perceptions of "Free and Fair" -- The Fear of Political Uncertainty -- A Concern for Outcomes Over Processes -- Elections and Transition in 2014 -- Notes.

Offering the first long-term on-the-ground study since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Noah Coburn introduces readers to daily life in Afghanistan through portraits of local residents and stories of his own experiences. He reveals the ways in which the international community has misunderstood the forces driving local conflict and the insurgency, misunderstandings that have ultimately contributed to the political unrest rather than resolved it. -- From publisher's description

Drawing on field research and relevant literature, Noah Coburn examines the difficulties of international electoral support, particularly during the 2014 Afghan national elections. Coburn highlights how different international actions impacted expectations and public response. He advises how international actors wishing to aid elections could better accomplish their goals without damaging the legitimacy of an election.

This volume shows how Afghani elections since 2004 have threatened to derail the country's fledgling democracy. Examining presidential, parliamentary, and provincial council elections and conducting interviews with more than one hundred candidates, officials, community leaders, and voters, the text shows how international approaches to Afghani elections have misunderstood the role of local actors, who have hijacked elections in their favor, alienated communities, undermined representative processes, and fueled insurgency, fostering a dangerous disillusionment among Afghan voters

The town of Istalif, located in the plains of Parwan north of Kabul, and the political lives of the potters that live there, provide a rich ethnographic example for how even areas that supported the US invasion and the new government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan eventually became disillusioned with the rhetoric from these groups and their failure to produce real change in the lives of ordinary Afghans. The funding, both military and development, that poured into the country, particularly between 2009 and 2013, enriched a regional elite that was not interested in distributing wealth and political power, unlike more local leaders. This shift in the socio-economy of power in Istalif, and elsewhere in the country, helps explain the rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic, but also shows how local politics in Afghanistan reshaped US policy and its approach to intervention and empire.