Afghanistan is often misunderstood as a country of Pashtuns, while Pashtuns like any other ethnic group compose only a minority. In this paper, the roots of this misunderstanding are touched upon. While colonization as a phenomenon has almost disappeared at state-level, within the states this it...

Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 1999) has attracted much attention with his historicising model of the trajectory of African politics. The most fertile innovation in Mamdani's work is to speak of the typical African state as 'bifurcated'. He generalises South Africa's apartheid system to the whole of...