Afghanistan is an ethnicity with a state. That is the bottom line of Niamatullah Ibrahimi’s book, which maps the political relationships between the Pashtun-dominated nation and the Hazaras, Afghanistan’s third largest ethnic group (after the Tajiks), and a deeply marginalized one. As Ibrahimi explains, the Pashtun Amir Abdur Rahman’s reign between 1880 and 1901 imposed a new pattern on Afghan state-building that is still visible today. His British backers named him the “Iron Amir” for his ruthlessness in quelling some forty rebellions against increased centralized rule. The most protracted of these was the 1891–3 Hazara War, a conflict Ibrahimi describes as “the prime example of genocide in the history of modern Afghanistan”, “comparable only to genocides such as the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994”. Read more...
Article published in the Times Literary Supplement
SASNET researcher Admir Skodo wrote an article for the Times Literary Supplement entitled "Permanent crisis of legitimacy".