Integrity Score 380
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Chapter 3 continues…
All such phases of high and low level conflicts have yielded consequences that are not only massive in magnitude but also in intensity.
For centuries, stronger powers have intervened in their peripheries to establish politically favourable order. Before the arrival of European imperialism in Asia, the territory of today’s Afghanistan constituted a shifting frontier among empires of the neighbouring regions. The arrival of British and Russian empires led to the demarcation of the country as a buffer state between these empires, and British aid enabled the Afghan Emperor to ‘stabilize’ the country with a repressive rule that lacked full external sovereignty.
The 1905 Anglo-Russian treaty on Afghanistan, Persia and Tibet, which established the status of Afghanistan, illustrates the fact that, during this period, the European states that constituted the core of the imperial state system tried to regulate their competition through a stable division of colonial spheres. Great powers co-operated to impose a common juridical framework over the entire globe, but a framework that institutionalized unequal political and legal status for different territories and people.
Afghanistan, which gained full independence in 1919 eventually joined the League of Nations. Other states who gained independence from imperial domination followed as the contemporary global framework for security developed with the foundation of the United Nations system after World War II. The UN oversaw the extension of decolonisation, extending the international regime of national sovereignty enshrined in its charter to the entire globe.
During the Cold War the struggle over building post-colonial states largely took the form of competing foreign aid projects among the alliance systems led by the USA and USSR. Afghanistan received aid from both the camps. The end of US-Soviet de-facto cooperation tore the country apart. After the end of the Cold War, regional competition continued the process of state destruction.
To be continued…