From War Economy to Peace Economy? Reconstruction and State Building in Afghanistan
Author(s)
Goodhand, Jonathan
Abstract
Winning the peace in Afghanistan depends in no small part on international and domestic efforts to transform the war economy into a peace economy. Based on international experience, this is unlikely to happen quickly. In other contexts, economic activity generated in conflict has persisted into “peacetime” conditions. This article puts forward a tentative framework for understanding the war economy and explores some of the implications for current efforts to build peace. While it focuses on how the Afghan economy has been “adjusted” by war, this process can only be understood with reference to the politics of state formation and state crisis in Afghanistan and the wider region. Four interrelated themes are highlighted. First, the war economy has been both a cause and a consequence of state crisis. Second, the war economy has empowered borderlands, transforming the politics of core-periphery relations in Afghanistan. Third, the war economy is part of a regional conflict system, with Afghanistan reverting to its pre-buffer state status of a territory with open borders, crossed by trade routes. Fourth, international actors helped create the war economy by supporting armed groups in the 1980s and adopting a policy of containment in the 1990s.
