In the coming weeks and months, Taliban leaders will likely sit down to hammer out a new constitution for Afghanistan. This will restart a ...
In the coming weeks and months, Taliban leaders will likely sit down to hammer out a new constitution for Afghanistan. This will restart a process that was, for them, rudely interrupted by the American invasion: twenty years ago, the Taliban were drafting a document before they were jettisoned from power. A new Taliban constitution would replace or modify the one ratified in 2004, which in turn superseded a number of constitutions imposed and violently discarded in the blood-soaked past half century of Afghan history.
Any Afghan law code produced by a group of heavily armed Taliban fighters will, no doubt, significantly turn back the clock on rights, freedoms, and progress. But a historian like Linda Colley might point out that, regardless of the Taliban’s antediluvian world view, such an exercise would also be a thoroughly modern one. It would be similar to many other instances when armed men (bearing swords or rifles instead of RPGs) have drafted constitutions in the past.
Colley has produced a book which upturns many of our notions of written constitutions and history. We usually associate constitution-making with freedom, the spread of democracy, and the unique histories of particular nation states. The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, in contrast, presents a profoundly global...
