The ICRC has published a new 2024 Opinion Paper explaining their approach in legally classifying contemporary armed conflicts. It is intended to make the ICRC’s methodology for classification accessible and transparent for all who are interested in the subject. The last time that the ICRC published an Opinion Paper on this matter was 2008. Since …
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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 …
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 …
Introduction The seemingly sudden outburst of significant violence in Northern Ethiopia has raised international concern, as well as critical legal paradigmatic issues. Accordingly, in this post, we evaluate this current situation in Ethiopia in light of international humanitarian law (IHL) requirements for the classification of armed conflicts. The post argues that the carefully planned, coordinated, …