In their latest report for PeaceRep, an international research consortium led by Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh, Professor Michael Semple and Mawlvi Atta ur Rahman, the last deputy of Afghanistan High Council for National Reconciliation, offer fresh thinking on how to unstick the Afghan peace process in the light of the Taliban’s consolidation of their monopoly of power and the failure of efforts to achieve compromise through engagement with them.

The report Peace Matrix for Afghanistan: Strengthening Afghans’ pursuit of democracy, freedom and economic recovery chronicles the development of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and focuses on its authoritarian characteristics.  It considers the nature of the current conflict in the country, in which levels of armed conflict have fallen since the period of the insurgency, but in which many major conflict drivers still operate.  In no meaningful sense can Afghanistan be considered at peace.

The report re-imagines the peace process, in the context of power monopolised by Islamist authoritarians.  It proposes a matrix of actions undertaken simultaneously by multiple actors, to create conditions for future peace-making, in contrast to the conventional peace road-map approach.

Read the report here.

 

Professor Michael Semple

Michael Semple is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast.

He works on innovative approaches to peace-making and engagement with militant Islamic movements in Afghanistan and South Asia.