Afghanistan’s Political Development Dilemma: The Centralist State Versus a Centrifugal Society

This article examines how a troubled relationship between a centralist state and centrifugal society has posed a serious challenge to state-building in Afghanistan. Drawing on ‘state–society relations’ theory, the article examines how this persistent obstacle has repeatedly interfered with efforts to consolidate a sovereign state in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The article investigates the historical roots of the uneven relationship between the state and society by comparing Musahiban’ s state conservatism with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’s attempted social transformation strategy. The article develops a new framework for the analysis of state-building where state policies and social behaviours are considered mutually significant in the state-building process. Moreover, by comparing the two major state-building strategies, the article investigates the implication of pre-war approaches in the post-2001 context.