A facet of the current war in Ukraine that has attracted less attention, understandably so in the circumstances, concerns transitional justice in Donetsk and Luhansk if Ukraine is able to fully repel Russian forces and regain control of all its national territory. Both Donetsk and Luhansk are self-proclaimed ‘people’s republics’ that have had de facto …
I am incredibly grateful for all of the thoughtful contributions to this symposium, and read them with genuine excitement. The research for the Negotiating Survival and the writing process took many twists and turns. Initially, the focus wasn’t even civilian life under the Taliban. I intended to investigate the Taliban itself, and specifically how ideology …
“Negotiating Survival” Book Symposium – Author Response to Contributors Read More »
Negotiating Survival is an outstanding piece of scholarship. The book is the latest addition to a (relatively) recent, fieldwork-intensive, wave of civil war research that is interested in how rebels rule areas under their control (see, for instance, Mampilly 2011, Arjona et al. 2015, Stuart 2021). More specifically, the work fits within a particular strand of this rebel governance literature …
“Negotiating Survival” Book Symposium –Glancing at the Taliban Organisation Read More »
Ashley Jackson’s book, Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan, is an important contribution to the way we understand armed insurgency. It challenges a vision of the absolute centrality of kinetic violence in insurgency to draw attention to the significance of more subtle power dynamics between rebels and the civilian population. In its approach, in its focus, and …
Ashley Jackson’s Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan provides a brilliant account into the daily struggles that people encounter amid prolonged violence and precarity. Drawing on multi-sited field research in Afghanistan (2017 – 2019), involving interviews with over 400 informants, the book examines negotiations made among insurgents and civilians to survive. Jackson introduces a novel theory of …
Introduction With ‘Negotiating Survival’ Ashley Jackson has written an extraordinary account of insurgent-civilian relations in Afghanistan. Amongst others, it traces the evolution of the Taliban insurgency after the Taliban regime was ousted from power in 2001. The book builds on a unique and rich set of empirical data collected during Jackson’s fieldwork. With the fall …
Ashley Jackson’s fascinating book ‘Negotiating Survival: Civilian – Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan’ (Hurst 2021) forms part of an important contemporary effort in political and social science literature to turn away from privileging the study of combatant behaviour in war, looking instead more closely at civilian perspectives and responses. The book focuses on the relationship between the Taliban and …
Ashley Jackson’s extraordinary book, Negotiating Survival, is a fascinating dive into the complex interactions that characterize relationships between civilians and members of armed groups. In the last decade, understanding how armed groups interact with people under their influence has become a central topic in the study of civil war. While a growing body of research references negotiations …
I finished the proofs for Negotiating Survival in the late spring of 2021, just as the Taliban mounted a sweeping offensive across the north of the country. I had spent years researching the insurgency, documenting all of the ways in which it was laying the ground work for this moment. It was disorienting to see …
I am humbled by the generous comments of nine excellent readers of my book, Lawmaking under Pressure. Having worked on it for many years, to see this wide range of scholars and practitioners use superlative words to refer to it, is just thrilling. I can only hope that the book will eventually be seen as …
‘Lawmaking under Pressure’ Book Symposium – An Initial Response to Commentators Read More »