Soldier's individual skills are by far the most important and elementary in an armed conflict. A soldier is exposed to psychological challenges that affect his ability to perform. The academic literature is dominated by studies where adaptation is investigated at an organisational level and follows an ‘up-down' structure. Therefore, is it not only interesting but also important to study how the environmental changes mentally affect the soldier and his ability to solve his duties.  The purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of the environment on the soldier and the soldier's response to dealing with this effect. The study aims to test I-ADAPT Theory in a new context, investigating how external factors, in the environment of FS22, affect the soldier's mental processes.  The results of the study showed primarily that the establishments of routines had a great impact on the soldiers’ performance and their ability to adapt to the new environment.

The dissertation compiles a series of essays which describes effects of various institutional variations randomized across a sample of 500 villages in Afghanistan in 2007. The first essay examines the institutional effects of the creation of democratically-elected, gender-balanced village development councils across 474 village councils. The creation of councils is found to have no effects on the structure and function of local governance or on how male villagers perceive local governance quality. However, council creation provokes increased local governance activity among paramilitary commanders – who experience broad-based improvements in public perceptions – and improves perceptions of local governance quality among women. The results indicate that externally-imposed de jure reforms do not substantially alter institutional outcomes, but may provoke countervailing responses by political authorities seeking to benefit from the institutional change. The second essay examines the effects of direct democracy on the alignment between public resource allocation decisions and citizen preferences. Using data from 250 villages, the study compares decision outcomes produced by secret-ballot referenda with outcomes produced by public meetings led by an elected village council. The results indicate that while elites do exert influence over outcomes produced by public meetings, their preferences do not determine the outcomes of referenda, which are influenced primarily by citizen preferences. Referenda are also found to improve citizen satisfaction, which is particularly low where elites exert undue influence over outcomes. The third essay examines whether the inclusion of villages in Afghanistan‘s largest development program affects counter-insurgency outcomes, such as individual perceptions of well-being, attitudes towards government, and the occurrence of violent incidents in surrounding areas. The program is found to affect all three measures, but only in areas with low levels of initial violence. The results indicate that development programs can limit the onset of insurgencies in relatively secure areas, but are not effective in improving attitudes to government and reducing violence where insurgents are already active. / Government

Currently, there are approximately 1.1 million caregivers who are caring for veterans who have served in the military following September 11 (9/11), 2001 (Ramchand et al., 2014). In this study, a mixed methods analysis of post 9/11 caregivers enrolled in the North Florida South Georgia Caregiver Support Program was completed with a convenience sample of 172 participants for quantitative analysis which included 16 participants for the phenomenological query. Correlations, t-tests, and ANOVAs were used to determine the associations among race, gender, age, caregiver type, diagnosis, tier level, and the presence of children in the home with caregiver burden as measured by the Zarit caregiver burden inventory (ZBI). T-tests resulted in a significantly higher ZBI with caregivers who had children in the home (M = 6.84; SD = 3.21) versus those who did not (M = 5.57; SD = 2.75), t (160) = -2.36, p=.02. An ANOVA was conducted across caregiver role (parent, spouse, significant other and other) and the ZBI and a significant difference was found (F [3, 159] = 1.59, p < .01, with spousal caregivers having a significantly higher ZBI score (M=6.83; SD=3.10) than parental caregivers (M = 4.46; SD=2.70). The phenomenological research focused on shared lived experiences of post 9/11 caregivers of seriously injured veterans, including their experiences with the Caregiver Support Program, the impact of having children in the home, and the utilization of technology and online support with caregiving. Differences between spousal and parental caregivers were also explored. The caregivers’ shared experiences resulted in 22 major themes which included family adjustment, subjective demands, coping techniques, social support, Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD) services, self-care, intimacy, role strain, financial resources, and life course changes as the most prevalent. Caregivers and their families had a difficult time adjusting post injury, particularly with subjective demands. Caregivers relied mainly on their own coping mechanisms to adapt to their new role and did not find social support to be helpful with caregiving. Spousal caregivers tended to have more difficulty adjusting than did parental caregivers, which was also found in the quantitative study. While the Caregiver Support Program provided many services that were helpful to the caregivers, including a financial stipend, they wanted additional services which included additional financial support and services while citing issues with program implementation and staffing as major barriers. Children added complexity to the caregiving relationship and increased burden. Children displayed behavioral changes, mostly negative, but some positive such as giving both the caregiver and the veteran a sense of purpose. Lastly, technology and online support with caregiving was used more often than not with mixed feelings about the technology and its trustworthiness; with parents not utilizing these resources as much as spousal caregivers. The study concludes with implications for current and future social work practice and research, as well as the study’s strengths and limitations.

Liberal Statebuilding in post-conflict societies is a very complex, intricate and dynamic task that is often based on liberal assumptions. Critiques argue that local contributions to define democracy and its norms, such as accountability, tend to be limited since local experiences are often perceived by the aid and statebuilding community to predate liberal requirements. Democratic norms are consequently often based on external international legitimacy and intentions rather than on domestic acceptance. In order to explore this further, this thesis critically examines the development of one democratic norm, accountability, in Afghanistan by using field data and applying Sikkink and Finnemore’s Norm Life Cycle to three accountability characteristics. These map out the norm’s legitimacy, its methods and relationship between Afghan citizens and government in order to understand the manifestation of accountability. The objective of the thesis is to assess whether accountability in Afghanistan was developed as intended by liberal statebuilding between 2001 and 2013. Empirical findings show that accountability did not manifest per the liberal democratic definition since the social and political realities that heavily impact norm development were not incorporated in the statebuilding approach. Combining theoretical and conceptual analysis, the research contributes to the Critical Peace Studies and Good Enough Governance literature and concludes that the liberal statebuilding methodology introduced accountability in a de-contextualised way that deprived it from norm contestation and local legitimacy. The thesis argues that this had both positive and negative effects. Accountability was introduced to a context that could benefit from its existence, but its introduction was done in an inconsistent manner that weakened its domestic conceptualisation by ignoring the link between social action and political power. Moreover the international community’s role in promoting accountability in Afghanistan both advanced and hampered the development of the liberal norm. Donors were able to raise accountability’s profile in the democratisation process but did so from an inaccessible and unaccountable political space that further removed Afghan citizens from policymaking and politics. The thesis’ application of a norm development lens to statebuilding provides a more in-depth and nuanced analysis to democratisation and one that, I hope, is original. It uses this alternative methodology to engage both with academic debate, and with policy development and implementation. The suggested approach allows for a better insight into the mergence between liberal concepts and local contexts as it not only confirms the existence of hybridity or mergence, but it also elaborates on its quality and consequences. It further proposes a more emancipatory statebuilding process that moves beyond a top-down vs. bottom-up perspective to a more enfranchised and integrated approach.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’agentivité des femmes et à la participation de ces dernières aux efforts visant la cessation des hostilités et la consolidation de la paix suite à un conflit armé. Ce travail porte une attention particulière aux obstacles rencontrés par celles désirant participer aux négociations formelles ainsi qu’aux stratégies qu’elles emploient pour les surmonter alors qu’elles sont exclues des modes traditionnels du pouvoir. Trois processus de paix tenus à la suite des conflits en Bosnie, au Burundi et en Afghanistan seront analysés afin d’identifier les divers obstacles auxquelles elles sont confrontées et d’illustrer les stratégies mises en œuvre par celles-ci afin de faire valoir leurs objectifs pour la paix. Ce travail souligne l’apport indéniable des femmes aux efforts de paix et argumente en faveur d’une inclusion systématique de ces dernières dans l’ensemble des initiatives de stabilisation et de reconstruction post-conflictuelles.

To tackle one of the world’s worst maternal, neonatal and child health outcomes and a chronic shortage of human resources for health, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health deployed volunteer Community Health Workers (CHW) in rural areas of Afghanistan in 2003. This thesis documents the Afghan CHW program, exploring organizational and community contexts. The research design in this study is a mixed methods case study. The actual Afghan CHW program was situated with an Afghan complex adapative health system, mainly guided by the policy of the health system but was also largely influenced by the power and gender dynamics of the community context in which it was implemented. The tasks of CHWs were numerous but CHWs role was more than just the sum of their tasks; they occupied a unique location juxtaposed between formal and informal HRH systems. It is important to acknowledge the assembly of so many national and international organizations in achieving a shared goal of providing health services to a large population in an unstable and partially insecure environment. The shared goal in the Afghan context may have been interpreted only in terms availability of services, though the goal carries with it, either explicitly or implicitly, the values of effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, and costliness – known as quality by some participants of this study. The community component was another layer of the complex adaptive system that made up the Afghan CHW program. Political-ethnic power in the community and legal-rational authority of the health system influenced the way communities were mapped in an inequitable manner, in turn, contributed to the unfair distribution of resources to the populations. Finally, the intersection of the gender equity approach and the gendered nature of the work as a cross-cutting layer added to the complexity of the Afghan health system.

Improvement in information sharing and communication about the foreign aid resources between the donors and the aid-recipient countries have always been considered very important. In recent years, the integration of advanced technology in the area of aid coordination has received a tremendous amount of attention. The following thesis studies the influence of technology in the area aid coordination within the context of Afghanistan. Guided by the Actor-Network Theory, the thesis examines how the social and technological aspects of the Development Assistance Database (DAD), as an advanced aid information management technology, influences aid coordination and information sharing between the donors and the government of Afghanistan. Using a case study methodology, the research also investigates whether or not the DAD adheres to the principles of aid effectiveness. The findings reveal that although technology had a profound impact in the area of aid management in Afghanistan, there are several areas that still face challenges. The present study highlights these challenges and recommends the appropriate solutions.

Although different studies have been conducted on various aspects of the National Solidarity Program (NSP) in Afghanistan, research on strengthening solidarity and social cohesion through its participatory approach has received little attention. This research used development communication as a theoretical framework to understand the role of participatory communication in strengthening solidarity and social cohesion in Afghanistan. The study employed a qualitative case study. To this end, the study used semi-structured interviews via email and telephone with 10 participants. Thematic analysis was used to code and categorize the data. The study findings show that the NSP appears to promote participation and increase collectiveness among the Afghan people, which, in turn, seem to strengthen solidarity and social cohesion. Finally, future research areas are discussed in the light of these findings.

The diploma paper is dealing with the matter of Provincial reconstruction team of the Czech Republic operating in Loghar province in Afghanistan. The goal of the paper is its assessment followed by a suggestion of optimalization of the present strategy of the Czech Republic and the project management in consideration of the Provincial reconstruction team in this province. On the basis of investigated information there will be submitted a proposal of a new strategic document of the Czech Republic for the reconstruction Loghar province. These thesis will also include a summary of correction measures in the area of operation and aim of the projects.

This work contains 4 main parts. Firstly, it is focused on application of the concept of failed states and the theoretical point of view. Second part offers 4 theoretical principals concerning with the problem o failed states. In the third part it brings an analysis of the situation in Afghanistan by using Failed state Index. The last part offers case study about Czech mission in Afghanistan.