Youth in Tajikistan and Afghanistan struggle to attend secondary school. Educational research indicates that individual, family and community factors are key determinants of educational participation. The question that dominated past research was whether family or community variables had a greater influence on educational participation. Instead, this article asks how the community context shapes the influence of family characteristics on educational participation. Using recent data from the Tajikistan Living Standards Measurement Survey and Afghanistan National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment, we demonstrate ways that school availability, school costs and work opportunities shape individual and family determinants of youth educational participation in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. We find that there is greater divergence between communities in Tajikistan than in Afghanistan.

An indispensable part of the liberal peacebuilding package is rebuilding effective and meritocratic administrative structures. This paper analyses building state institutions in Afghanistan with a focus on the role of warlords in the process. The findings are based on in-depth interviews conducted from 2012 to 2016 in five different provinces of Afghanistan. The paper uses neopatrimonialism as an analytical framework to shed light on our understanding of warlords’ influence on building state institutions in a war-torn country such as Afghanistan. The paper argues that warlords have played a major role in the formation of neopatrimonialism in the country, a system that has proven pervasive, flexible and resistant to change. Additionally, this paper contends that neopatrimonial networks centred on warlords have been relatively effective in delivering services to those within the network while excluding others, nonetheless creating enough legitimacy and support to survive. Overall, this neopatrimonial system excludes some segments of the population and is very difficult to reform to make it more inclusive.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract