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Neil Englehart, assistant professor of government and law, will discuss findings from a book manuscript he recently completed in a lecture titled “Making Little Dictators: The U.S. in Afghanistan” noon Friday in Interfaith Chapel, Hogg Hall.
Sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office Brown Bag Series, the event is free and open to the campus community. Lunch may be brought or purchased for $3. The program is the first in an evolving series of discussions about peace and conflict resolution.
Englehart’s lecture will be based on a chapter for a book on state failure that he began at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he spent last school year after receiving an appointment. The book also includes case studies in Burma, Bihar in North India, and Somalia, as well as a statistical chapter incorporating data from 134 countries.
“The basic argument is that strong state institutions are necessary for human rights,” says Englehart. “Many states, however, are actually quite weak. The core problem in promoting human rights is thus not — as people often think — protecting people against states, but rather using states to protect them from petty dictators and local bosses who emerge when states are weak.”
In Afghanistan, the U.S. war has reinstalled many of the very warlords who proliferated after the collapse of the Soviet-supported regime in 1992, says Englehart. The Taliban had eliminated many of these figures and begun to restore some basic order to the country, becoming quite popular in some areas because they had disarmed local gangs and strongmen.
“The U.S., in its search for allies against the Taliban, helped to rearm some warlords, despite the fact that they make it difficult for the new central government to extend its power into the provinces,” Englehart says. “Since the warlords are unelected and not accountable to anyone, they often have human rights records every bit as bad as the Taliban. Just in the last week it has emerged that they will probably delay the elections that were scheduled for this summer.”
Before his appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, Englehart spent the prior school year on junior faculty leave at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, researching the particular set of institutions that comprise the modern state — territoriality, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of the use of force
He is the author of Culture and Power in Traditional Siamese Government, a book in which he argues that political reform in 19th-century Siam is an example of intentional cultural change in response to new ideas. Previously, Englehart received a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Thailand and a Fulbright scholarship for language study there.
For more on Englehart and his appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, see the related story on Lafayette’s web site.