Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform (GFN-SSR)

Who Governs Kabul? Explaining Urban Politics in a Post-War Capital City

 Printable version

Wars, particularly civil wars, are increasingly focused on cities. How can they best be tackled? This study from Columbia University reviews the history of city politics in Kabul and the processes of governance that occur at different levels. Multi-layered conflicts in capital cities can concentrate political attention and overload urban development and governance agendas. It should be understood that, in post-war capital cities, conflicts at the fault lines of local, national and international institutions shape political and economic agendas for the city.

Today, civil wars are the most common forms of warfare. They have a crucial urban dimension not only in terms of social losses, but also in creating challenges and alterations to the local polity. Cities have always been part of battlefields of war but, today, they are the primary space in which wars are taking place. Recent international reconstruction efforts in war zones in developing regions have paid little attention to the urban dimension of conflicts, thus leaving unexplored possible causations running between urban policy, urban social reality and violent conflict.

Amid intensifying international interconnectedness and simultaneous assertions that cities are positioned to supersede national governance, capital cities include political control and exclusion, wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity. The ever-growing importance of cities as centres of political and economic power and as resources in developing countries is also increasingly prompting contenders to concentrate both peaceful and violent political campaigns in spaces of urban primacy. But city-centred struggles are not only about resources and access to power. They also challenge the meanings and functions of the nation as a whole.

Overfilled with donor monies and reconstruction machineries, these cities become highly politicised arenas characterised by discrepancies in political as well as economic leverage among different stakeholders. They are governed neither exclusively locally nor jointly by local and national entities. They are ruled by ad hoc axes of governance that revolve around shared short-term incentives and interests of national and international actors.

Comparing recent politics and policies in Kabula with historical data, this paper shows that:

• Before the Russian invasion urban conflict ran between rival tribal and ethnic interests.
• In post-war Kabul it is the national-international axis that develops policies to alter institutions in the city.
• Local interests and priorities are excluded. Policymaking after 2001 has excluded the city's residents even more.

In order to prevent 'over-determined' cities from inciting renewed large-scale violence, there needs to be:

• context-specific analyses of urban histories and their particular interfaces with the political economies of state creation and consolidation;
• an open assessment of opportunities and limitations of political engagement at the city level;
• an analysis of the ways in which cities can become an arena for brokering peace in developing countries; and
• understanding that neglect of equitable urban development reactivates triggers of violent conflict. These include restricted access to local policymaking and urban land market, youth unemployment and poor urban services.

Access full text