Western-style Governance Research Articles

Calibrating Engagement with the Taliban

Since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban quickly took over the country, Western governments, including the United Kingdom, have been reluctant to engage with an Islamist regime that has hosted al-Qaeda and trampled on human rights. Under the Taliban, however, violence, corruption and narcotics traffic appear to have been dramatically reduced. The Taliban regime has also established a reasonable level of security and cracked down on corruption. Completely isolating the regime could have perverse security as well as humanitarian consequences. Short of another invasion and occupation, there is no prospect of a secular, Western-style government re-emerging. Through discreet engagement, the West should try to nudge the current regime away from its unworldly posture towards a more pragmatic one.

Local Government Capacity in Post-Soviet Central Asia

This paper explores the context, problems, quality, and challenges of local governance in four Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The prime focus is on the question of whether local governments in this region perform their functions in an effective and efficient way. It looks at the four conditions – contextual, structural, institutional and human resource conditions – as factors for explaining the capacity of local governments in the region. These questions will be investigated with reference to academic literature and policy papers on the topic. The findings indicate that local governments in Central Asia do not have real capacity to adequately address the needs and concerns of citizens, as they are heavily dependent on the central government in all policy issues, be it taxation, service delivery, local development, or privatization. The study suggests that local government reform in this region is not simply a matter of introducing Western-style governance structures or granting more autonomy to local actors. It is, more importantly, about understanding local socio-political context and promoting socio-economic change.

Personal Jurisdiction in Tribal Courts

Long before the first European immigrants set foot on American shores, Indian tribes had systems to administer justice. Long after the federal government had effectively subjugated tribal governments, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act to encourage tribes to “organize Western-style governments.” Formal court systems, “a relatively recent development in Indian Country,” are essential components of a functioning Western-style government. These court systems have grown substantially over the past three decades. In 1974, the American Indian Law Training Program began publishing the In-

Fundamentalism and the Secular Society

FUNDAMENTALISM IS AN UNSATISFACTORY TERM, but it is widely used to describe a militant piety that has developed in every major religion during the 20th century. The aim of fundamentalists-be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or Buddhist-is to bring God and/or religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in secular culture and back to centre stage. It constitutes a widespread rebellion against secular modernity. In every country where a western-style government has been established, a fundamentalist counterculture has developed alongside it in deliberate reaction, aiming to create a sacred enclave of pure faith in a world that seems increasingly hostile to religion.Hence every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been rooted in fear, convinced that the secular, liberal establishment wants to wipe out religion. Each movement has developed in a symbiotic relationship with a modernity and secularism that is experienced as invasive and aggressive. The more fundamentalists are attacked, the more extreme they become, because the assault convinces them that they are correct in their assumption, and that the modern world truly wants to annihilate them and their religion. This is not necessarily paranoid. Jewish fundamentalism became especially prevalent after the Nazi Holocaust and after the October War of 1973, and in the Muslim world, secularism has often been imposed so aggressively-by such reformers as Ataturk, the shahs of Iran, or Gemal Abdul Nasser-that it has seemed an evil, lethal ideology.Modernity has always been problematic. When the western countries began to develop their modern, secular institutions in the 16th century, they were engulfed in three centuries of bloody revolution, dictatorships, anomie, exploitation of women and children, and violent wars of religion. We are watching a similar process in countries that are making the painful rite of passage to modernity today. In some Muslim countries, there are special difficulties. In the west, the modern spirit was characterized by two essential qualities: independence and innovation. In the Muslim world, however, modernization did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation; and the west was so far ahead that there could be no innovation-only imitation. So the wrong ingredients are going into the modern spirit there.Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, dedicated to fighting the secular state. It is part of the modern world and it is not going to fade away. We must, therefore, deal with it more intelligently than we have done hitherto. Contrary to much popular opinion, Islam is not more disposed towards fundamentalism than other faiths; in fact, it was the last of the three Abrahamic traditions to develop a fundamentalist strain. Nor is there anything in Islam that is inherently hostile to modernity. Much of the terrorism that disturbs us at present is Arab, and Arabs comprise only about 20 percent of Muslims worldwide. Fundamentalism is not necessarily violent; most fundamentalists are simply trying to live an embattled religious life and do not take part in acts of terror. …

The Indonesian Federal Problem

pRESSING day-to-day issues have submerged longer-range questions of form and structure of government since Indonesia's unitarian structure was instituted in August i950; yet, after a year of experience with the new system, the prospect of efforts at constitutional reform seems more likely. National elections, looking to the creation of a Constituent Assembly,' are being prepared,2 although they probably cannot be held before i952. Under the constitution, the Constituent Assembly, together with the Government, is to replace the existing provisional constitution with a permanent one. Although one might forecast the main directions of possible constitutional change, the present article will not attempt to do so. Indonesian leaders, by and large, have not given sufficient thought to the problems to provide any solid basis for advancing beyond what might be termed, at best, educated guesses. The following discussion will, therefore, be confined to a description and analysis of what the author considers to be the major constitutional and administrative problem facing the new government, namely, the problem of central-local relationships. Even with this limited objective, a word of caution is in order. For an outsider, it is no easy task to decide what are the standards by which Indonesian institutions should be measured. Should governmental forms be gauged only in terms of the existing stage of Indonesia's revolutionary struggle and the limited governmental experience of Indonesia's past? Are there, in short, any valid indigenous norms? Or should judgments be based on the constitutional and administrative experience of the older Western states? Indonesia, after all, professes to have a Western-style government. Its constitution and other institutions of government at the national level and, in large measure,