
In the early years after 2001, there were a range of initiatives to document former war crimes with a view to bring to justice perpetrators from all sides of the conflict, or at the very minimum, to inform decisions about who were suited for public office. In 2005, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission launched a comprehensive ‘Conflict Mapping’ project, the results of which have never been released.
Programme
- What happened to justice after 2001? Patricia Gossman
- The case for warlord accommodation in Afghan governance. Dipali Mukhopadhyay
Moderator: Kai Eide, former UN Special Representative for Afghanistan
Relevant Blog PostPatricia Gossman is senior researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch (HRW). Prior to joining HRW, she was Director of the Afghanistan Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice on Afghanistan, and she was the founder and director of the Afghanistan Justice Project, an OSI-funded project to document war crimes committed during the Afghan conflict, 1978-2001. Gossman was Senior Researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch in the 1990s, covering not only Afghanistan, but also India, Pakistan and Nepal. She received her doctorate in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago and is widely published on human rights issues in the region.
Dipali Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. She recently published the book Warlords, Strongman Governors and State Building in Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2014). Her current work on Afghanistan builds on her first book with a study of palace politics during the Karzai presidency. She also has two projects underway on the Syrian civil war related to Western engagement with the opposition and rebel governance. She is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mukhopadhyay holds adoctorate from Tufts University's Fletcher School.
Kai Eide is a Norwegian diplomat (retired), writer and analyst. He served as the United Nations Special Representative to Afghanistan from March 2008 to March 2010. Eide was previously the Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General in Kosovo (2005) and as Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Bosnia & Herzegovina in 1997–1998. He has been a member of the Norwegian Foreign Service since 1975, and held a variety of post, including as ambassador to NATO, and to OSCE. He has published the book Power Struggle Over Afghanistan: An Inside Look at What Went Wrong--and What We Can Do to Repair the Damage (Skyhorse, 2012).
Thomas Ruttig: Conflict Portrait: Afghanistan
This seminar is part of the Afghanistan Week 2018, a series of events related to Afghanistan, which is a collaboration between the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC), the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).