Abstract
When U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving the country in the hands of the Taliban, many once again asked: “What explains the failure of state-building in Afghanistan?” In his groundbreaking Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan, Florian Weigand provides a fresh answer to this question by shifting the “focus of attention from external assumptions on legitimacy to the people in Afghanistan” (p. 4). He suggests that the legitimacy of any political authority in a conflict zone like Afghanistan depends on perceptions of “interactive dignity”: that is, people’s ideas about whether political authorities are treating them respectfully on a day-to-day basis.
According to Weigand, when it comes to legitimacy, the Afghan people primarily care about a sense of mutual dialogue, fair procedures, and administrative predictability. In their eyes, what matters most is the process of everyday interaction with political authorities and not “how an actor gained authority and whether this happened through democratic, Islamic, or traditional procedures” (p. 46, emphasis original). Weigand argues that the Afghan people care more about how an authority figure talks to them, listens to them, and engages with them instead of the history of how that specific authority came to power. In other words, perceptions of legitimacy do not depend on religious, cultural, ideological, or economic benchmarks but emanate from the nature of the social relationship that is forged between authority figures and their intended citizenry. The implication is that neither international aid nor foreign intervention would suffice to ensure the legitimacy of a given political authority in Afghanistan (or elsewhere) unless governance arrangements match the values and expectations of citizens.
By emphasizing the voices of ordinary Afghanis thanks to its grounded, bottom-up approach, Waiting for Dignity thus invites us to expand the Weberian foundations of modern state theory. Instead of looking for conditions that would allow the creation of legal-bureaucratic forms of governance in Afghanistan, the author, with insights from Bourdieu, proposes a theorization of political order as a dynamic field consisting of multiple, competing authorities (Chapter 1). Within this field, Weigand finds that people have several concerns when it comes to determining whether a given authority is legitimate. In addition to calculations about the possibility of coercion, he argues that people’s perceptions of legitimacy can be divided into two main types: (1) instrumental legitimacy, concerning perceptions of how an authority responds to needs; and (2) substantive legitimacy, describing a more abstract belief in rightfulness (pp. 33–34). But even when people are drawn to a specific authority due to shared cultural values or are motivated by economic interests, what ultimately matters is how an authority is perceived to interact with claimants on a day-to-day basis.
The book’s eye-opening arguments are based on extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan that was conducted during 2014 and 2015, followed by additional trips during 2019. During these visits, the author conducted more than 500 interviews with a range of political authorities as well as “local people who were directly affected by them locally and, therefore, responsible for bestowing them with legitimacy” (p. 10). Such an intentional focus on how legitimacy is perceived and talked about by common people distinguishes Waiting for Dignity from other books on Afghanistan, which tend to use an external yardstick to measure legitimacy instead of listening to how people understand the meaning of legitimacy themselves.
Each one of the book’s empirical chapters (Chapters 2 through 5) focuses on a different political authority, including the state, strongmen and warlords, and finally community leaders, discussing both how these authority figures make sense of the origins and indications of their own legitimacy as well as how they are perceived by people under their immediate jurisdiction. Most chapters also include a within-case comparison to illustrate that even similar kinds of political authorities may generate different notions of influence and legitimacy. The second chapter, on the Afghan state, for example, compares people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of two different branches of the state’s security apparatus: while the Afghan National Army was perceived as legitimate, the Afghan National Police was not. Weigand argues that interviewees’ personal experiences with these political authorities was at the heart of their different assessments.
Through a comparison of the Nangarhar and Balkh provinces, the third chapter, similarly, examines how Afghani strongmen and warlords, despite their own claims, were perceived primarily as coercive authorities with limited capacity to generate a sense of substantive legitimacy. The fourth chapter, on the Taliban, by contrast, demonstrates that most people perceived the Taliban as legitimate because the Taliban “offered what was perceived to be fairer conflict resolution procedures than other authorities” (p. 185). What drew some Afghan people to the Taliban was primarily a desire to avoid corrupt political dealings and not necessarily a shared sense of religious conviction.
The last empirical chapter, on community leaders such as local councils, tribal leaders, and village elders, further affirms that Afghan people’s primary concern is for political authorities to resolve conflicts fairly, quickly, and predictably. In this fascinating chapter, we are introduced to local figures that do the bulk of the work one might expect from the state: they address concerns, resolve disagreements, direct resources, and coordinate security by dealing with outside forces. Most people found community leaders legitimate not because of a reverence toward traditional authority but because of an underlying belief in the “proximity, predictability, and perceived fairness of their conflict-resolution procedures” (p. 271). Community leaders were the ones most likely to deliver “interactive dignity,” while the state, strongmen, warlords, and Taliban often failed to do so.
The Afghanistan of Waiting for Dignity is no longer merely a curious case of failed state-building; rather, it is a country where competing political groups vie for authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public through a variety of mechanisms. Weigand models the possibility of studying the notion of political authority in a conflict zone by moving beyond the restrictive notion of bureaucratic-legal rationality. He not only challenges the idea that Afghanis are passive actors, blindly following whatever authority they are told to obey; he also confronts the dominant narrative that suggests that the legitimacy of a given political authority rests solely on their ideological outlook or the services they might potentially provide. Instead, Weigand writes that “most people did not expect much more than to be treated like human beings—with respect” (p. 185). I agree that acknowledging this simple but powerful fact goes a long way toward understanding politics in Muslim-majority contexts, and I welcomed this insightful analysis that departs from mainstream scholarly narratives of conflict zones.
I would recommend Waiting for Dignity to anyone interested in questions of state-building, political violence, or social order. It holds special value for those seeking to amplify local voices; it also encourages scholars to consider the enduring allure of the state. The book demonstrates the value of studying political meaning through a grounded approach, while simultaneously expanding on an important scholarly tradition that seeks to understand the formation and transformation of political authority.