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This creative project is the exploration of a healing garden for Afghan women who have been victims of war and terror. The project culminates with a masterplan and design for a healing garden in the rural village of Qala-e-Malakh in the Behsood District of the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan. This issue became a viable project when I was put into contact with Lalbibi (Bibi) Bahrami, an Afghan woman living in Yorktown, Indiana, and native of Qala-e-Malakh. She has worked tirelessly to create and raise funds for her organization, Afghan Women's And Kids' Education and Necessities (AWAKEN), which provides education, basic healthcare, and vocational training to women and children in several rural villages. It is my intent to determine how a designed space, incorporating elements of native culture, emotional treatment standards, and therapeutic garden research, can help heal and renew the spirits of women who have experienced such extreme tragedy and devastation. / Department of Landscape Architecture

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This study examines foreign policy change.In contrast to most previous research this study investigates when trend-and significant foreign policy changes occurs. This study is a case study that examines US foreign policy changes and actions towards the Islamic republic of Pakistan.This study will also be using Jakob Gustavsson’s theory on foreign policy change. This is a qualitative study.A relationship historically defined by its ups and downs. This study finds that it is most likely that in order for significant changes to occur in foreign policy there must be changes in the fundamental structural conditions. A plausible conclusion is that the trend change that has occurred is the result of a series of events under 2011 that led to a crisis between the two countries

This research examined the challenges, decisions, issues, and dilemmas facing the International Community (IC) in attempting to re-establish and rebuild public administration and other government institutions in a country that continues to suffer from instability and remains at high risk of further conflict. The research looks specifically at a subset of Public Administration Reform (PAR): Civil Service and Administrative Reform (CSAR). The research concludes that CSAR in a Fragile and Conflict Affected State (FCAS) such as Afghanistan is clearly a ‘wicked problem’ requiring innovative, iterative and adaptive responses by the IC over an extended time period. However, the IC treats CSAR in Afghanistan as a ‘tame’ problem simply framed in terms of ‘we are coming to build your capacity’, resulting in slow progress on public sector reform overall and little understanding of the relationship with overarching statebuilding and stabilisation objectives. Despite the acknowledgement of the importance of CSAR, IC support has fallen dramatically in recent years. The current approach to supporting CSAR in Afghanistan is therefore almost guaranteed to fail. The research calls for a new approach to PAR in these types of cases, one that recognises the severe limits to progress utilising existing approaches and structures rooted in Western notions of good government. A new approach goes beyond the overwhelming focus on capacity development; emphasises the importance of understanding what space exists for reform; recognises the need to pragmatically confront trade- offs between the competing objectives of reconciling stabilisation imperatives with wider considerations of ‘good governance’; and poses an alternative expanded framework for considering public administration, legitimacy, authority and representation in the government of an FCAS, partly as an organising framework but also as an aid to understanding the complexity of interrelated systems prevalent in an FCAS. The research also concludes that a great deal more independent academic research is required to understand how to make progress in Public Sector Reform (PSR), stabilisation and longer-term development that will help prevent countries slipping back into conflict.

The United States has shaped the global response to drugs over the last century. Afghanistan, and its resultant massive opium production, is the greatest failure of the internationalization of the American-led war on drugs. Starting during the Progressive-era, the United States backed a prohibitionist stance toward certain drugs, including opium and its derivatives. While Afghanistan was creating its own opium policies after complete independence from Great Britain, the United States pushed a global anti-drug approach. Despite having minimal contact previously, the Americans and Afghans joined in a brief, but significant, opium alliance during the Second World War, with the United States secretly purchasing the bulk of Afghan opium. After the war, the United States publicly asked Afghanistan to end opium cultivation while suggesting in private that the Afghans should continue production. At the United Nations, the Americans sabotaged the Afghans' attempt to get legal international recognition as an opium exporter. The United States did respond to Afghanistan's destitute condition by supplying developmental aid that would have the unforeseen consequence of increasing poppy cultivation. Improved transportation networks also provided opportunities for Western youth to visit Afghanistan as drug tourists and couriers. During the 1970s, the decade before the Soviet invasion, Washington's concern over Afghan opium reached the highest level of government. Despite new efforts to replace opium as a cash-producing plant, Afghan drug production steadily increased. With Afghanistan on the verge of transforming into a global producer of heroin, the United States fomented unrest in the nation by first funding and then backing known drug traffickers. Along with Soviet aggression, the American intelligence program led to chaotic conditions that were capitalized on by drug traffickers. After years of war in the 1980s and 1990s, Afghanistan gained the dubious title of the world's most prolific narco-state. After the post-9/11 invasion, with American boots on the ground for over a decade, Afghanistan remained a major source for opium. As a result, Afghanistan was the most visible breakdown of the American global war against drugs.

Afghanistan ist seit über 30 Jahren ein von Kriegen geschütteltes Land. Ende 2014 soll der Einsatz der ISAF-Truppen dort beendet werden, doch erscheint dieses „Manöver“ eher wie ein Abbruch denn wie ein geordneter Abzug nach erfolgreicher Mission. Die Sicherheitslage vor Ort ist weiterhin instabil. Das bedeutet auch Instabilität für die Region. Deutsche und internationale Experten ziehen die ernüchternde Bilanz eines militärischen Abenteuers, die bei zukünftigen Auslandseinsätzen - auch der Bundeswehr - bedacht werden sollte.

This thesis addresses the efforts of different states to establish their authority over the Pashtun ethnic group. The Pashtun are at the heart of the conflict in Afghanistan, and provide both an important and current example of why "ungoverned spaces" have become such hot topic among many of the world's countries. People that exist within a sovereign state's borders and outside the state's authority present a dangerous problem to both the state itself and the international community. To address the challenges facing a state engaged in establishing its authority over the Pashtun, this thesis identifies normative and organizational structural factors associated with rural Pashtun tribes and discusses how these factors impede state authority. These factors are applied to three cases which involved a modern government's efforts to establish its authority over the Pashtun. In almost every case, the state failed when it either misunderstood the importance of these structural factors or willfully ignored them to pursue other interests. Looking beyond the Pashtun case, the research in this thesis determines that policies focused purely on suppression, isolation, or accommodation are destined to fail in establishing state authority. The common failing of these three policies occurs when the state fails to understand the difference between establishing order and establishing authority. Finally, the state must seriously consider its capacity to expand its authority-the lower the capacity, the longer it will take and the more accommodating (but not purely accommodating) the state must act. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

The main theatre of the war in Afghanistan is in its borderlands to Pakistan. There the Taliban strongholds never ceased and its local population seem to affiliate with the enemy. December 1 2009 President Barack Obama presented a new “comprehensive” strategy concerning the mission in Afghanistan. This was a strategy highly dominated by counterinsurgency – or in other words to change the main focus from the enemy to the population. The study’s aim was to analyse the assessment of the borderlands in the new Afghanistan counterinsurgency mission. This was done with the tools of critical discourse analysis and also in identifying ideal types in the counterinsurgency theory. The goal was to understand how the borderlands were assessed in the mission and if the concepts of regional aspects, external support, winning hearts and minds and securing the population were addressed.  The results show that the borderlands were assessed well in accordance to counterinsurgency theory, but the specific cultural aspects of Afghanistan were given little attention. The situation in the borderlands is still to this day very unstable.

This thesis presents an ethnographic analysis of the practice of swara marriage among the Pashtun people of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, based on nine weeks of fieldwork in 2015. Swara is a form of compensation marriage practiced by Pashtun people in Pakistan and Afghanistan through which disputes between men are resolved through the giving away in marriage of girls, often minors, by guilty parties to victim parties. By employing practice theory and the theory of sacrifice, swara marriages are analyzed through the conceptualizations of honor, revenge, and ghairat (“bravery”). Focusing on six swara cases, the first half of the thesis explores the concepts of honor, revenge, and ghairat during the time of feuds. The second half of the thesis directly focuses on swara marriages and analyzes them through the concepts of symbolic capital and sacrifice. / May 2016