Federalism in Afghanistan: Power Interests, Religion, and Ethnicity in Political Discourse

Federalism is a contemporary principle of constitutional organization, rooted mainly in Western constitutional traditions. It entails a system in which individual constituent states retain limited sovereignty and autonomy, while collectively forming a unified overarching state. This model stands in clear and fundamental opposition to the Taliban’s centralized and fundamentalist Islamist concept of governance. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, the concept of federalism has sparked intense and controversial debate among Afghan activists and intellectuals since the Taliban’s return to power on 15 August 2021. While federalism has been a subject of discussion within smaller political and intellectual circles since the 1950s and 1960s, it has emerged as a significantly more prominent topic of debate over the past thirty years. In particular, the persistent and systematic discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities under the Taliban has intensified calls for political decentralization and proposals for regional autonomy. The article seeks to categorize the current debates on federalism in Afghanistan chronologically and discursively, analyzing the positions of its proponents and opponents through the lens of their religious and ethnic affiliations. Notably, the article does not treat ethnicity as a fixed or essential category, but rather as a socially and discursively constructed phenomenon.