Ashley Jackson

1/ Today @florian_weigand + I released a @ODIdev paper on Taliban courts in Afghanistan. It's short (based on research in Herat/Faryab) but the first salvo in what we *hope* is more work https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-documents/taliban_justice_briefing_note_web_final.pdf … Here’s a quick summary...

2/ The method: interviews w 200 Afghans who brought their cases to Taliban courts (mostly civil claims) + a handful interviews of Talibs + a dozen more w/ various experts We also collected Taliban written case records and various internal Taliban justice documents

3/ (I should add "we" is me+Flo, obviously, but also some absolutely brilliant researchers in Herat and Faryab who shall remain nameless for security and all of the other usual reasons, but without whom we would not have gotten very far)

4/ Taliban courts have unsurprisingly gotten more organized, accessible. But I was surprised how widespread they were, how openly they operated, how much ordinary people seemed to know it People would typically tell us the court meets on Tues+Thu (for ex) and the exact location

5/ Across the 20-odd districts, there was pretty much the same type of structure/procedure in each court – w some variations For ex: where there was fighting, it was predictably less orderly, less likely to conform to the “norm” of the courts in strongly Taliban influenced areas

6/ There's a long-standing narrative that ppl “choose” Taliban courts bc they are faster/fairer/better But where we did research, Taliban courts had displaced govt courts and coopted/cowed elders For civilians living in these places, it was pretty much Talib justice or nothing

7/ The real question is can the current govt legal system and the Taliban system be reconciled? If/when IAN move forward, what does that discussion look like? What is interesting is that on things like inheritance and property, the state and Taliban don’t seem *that* far apart

8/ Both govt civil law and Taliban courts rely on Hanafi jurisprudence, which has pretty clear norms on things like property rights, inheritance, debt, etc. (oversimplifying for brevity; there's the GoA Shia status law, which follows Shia tradition + lots of nuance I'm skipping)