Week 5: Gaining Insight
After meeting with my supervisor, we decided I should focus on Afghanistan and Cote d'Ivoire (CI). I had to narrow my research a little because many of the groups I had found were leaning more toward citizen militia rather than community-based police forces, and the state engagement with these groups was either non-existent or hostile. Likewise, many of the groups I found vacillated back and forth from defensive security providers to offensive militias set out to achieve their own political, economic, or territorial goals.
Instead, the two main groups I'll be focusing on are the arbakai and the dozos in Afghanistan and CI, respectively. Both are traditional community-based groups, but they each have different histories and relationships with their respective nation-states.
The arbakai are Pashtun-tribal "police" forces that enforce the decisions of tribal jirgas, patrol their communities, and provide border security. They are rooted in strong, long-standing tribal structures, and they are raised temporarily from members of the community. The jirgas provide clear jurisdictional mandates, such that after their missions are complete, the arbakai immediately reintegrate back into their communities.
On the other hand, the dozos are traditional hunters that historically spread across CI, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. Historically, dozos were revered in their communities and went through rites of passage to be initiated into this exclusive group. The dozos served not only as hunters for their communities, but also as protectors against predators, disease, and internal conflicts within and between tribes.
When the dozos came to CI from Mali, they formed an Ivorian Benkadi security movement. Benkadi means "agreement is sweet." Thus, the Benkadi dozos entered into agreements with local government leaders, administrators, and tribal leaders to provide security services for their communities. They went on nightly patrols and investigated crimes, even imposing a system of fines that compensated not only the dozos for their services, but also the victim for the harm they endured.
In recent years, both the dozos and the arbakai have met resistance from their national governments, but from very different perspectives and for different reasons. For a number of reasons, the dozos backed Alassane Ouattarra in the CI civil war, often committing atrocities of their own against communities they once protected. In Afghanistan, the current national government has been much more resistant to engaging the arbakai for state security needs, as has been done in the past, because the country has a history of various actors arming tribal militias either to the benefit of or to the detriment of the national government. Although it's not entirely clear to me yet why some groups "turn bad" and begin acting against the state or the people, it is clear that ignoring groups such as the arbakai and the dozos has not diminished their significance or influence in society. In the next few weeks, I hope to be able to synthesize some key factors that have made these groups successful or that have caused them to shift from helpful to harmful.
In addition to meeting with my supervisor and making some headway in my research for the summer, I also met with another member of the rule of law division at USIP, and he gave me some much-needed career insights. I've found that charting out a career path in rule of law programming fields is not quite as clear cut as some legal careers may be, and it's been extremely helpful to be able to sit down and talk with people who are "walking the walk" so to speak. After speaking with him, I am incredibly excited to see how my journey unfolds, and I'm looking forward to taking all the twists and turns in what I'm sure will be a challenging career path in stride. Que sera, sera!