U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part II: A Jeffersonian Alternative?

NCJ Number
244953
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 53 Issue: 2 Dated: March 2013 Pages: 197-214
Author(s)
Ali Wardak; John Braithwaite
Date Published
March 2013
Length
18 pages
Annotation
In part I of this article, U.S. President, Barack Obama, was reported as saying to his inner circle that their objective in Afghanistan is not to build a Jeffersonian democracy.
Abstract
Part II is about the idea that a more Jeffersonian architecture of rural republicanism in tune with Afghan traditions is a remedy to limits of the Hobbesian analysis of cases like Afghanistan in part I. Anomic spaces where policing and justice do not work are vacuums that can attract tyrannical forms of law and order, such as the rule of the Taliban. Peace with justice cannot prevail in the aftermath of such an occupation without a reliance on both local community justice and state justice that are mutually constitutive. Supporting checks on abuse of power through balancing local and national institutions that deliver justice is a more sustainable peace-building project than regime change and top-down re-engineering of successor regimes. (Published Abstract)