Journal Article
| 2013
A Poisonous Chalice: The Struggle for Human Rights and Accountability in Afghanistan
Human rights activists began to develop strategies for a transitional justice process in Afghanistan soon after the US-led intervention in 2001 and by mid-decade the efforts had culminated in an officially supported Action Plan. The Plan, however, was timid and prosecutions were at any rate neutralised by a subsequent amnesty law promulgated by the Afghan Parliament. Throughout, loose but enduring coalitions of national and international actors formed on both sides of the issue. This ensured that the question did not go away, but also that nothing was resolved. As chronicled in the ethnographic and process-oriented narrative below, the nascent Afghan state itself became the arena for the negotiations and contestations in this struggle.
