Afghan Culture in an Era of Globalisation

Thu 24 Jul 2014

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Presented by Professor William Maley, AM FASSA, Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University.

Afghanistan has long been famous for its rich material culture, a product of its history as a crossroads of diverse civilisations. Its diverse cultural norms have also long been recognised by researchers, although perhaps less by those responsible for popular images of what Afghanistan is like. What is arguably less appreciated is that it is currently undergoing a phase of very rapid sociocultural change, casting doubt on some of the simple verities that have often underpinned such images.

In this lecture, Professor William Maley will explore how forces of globalisation are generating patterns of modernisation very different from the ideologically-driven modernisation promoted by Marxist activists after the April 1978 communist coup, and will argue that these are likely to be the most durable legacy of the years since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Dr William Maley has served as a Visiting Professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University. He is a member of the Australian Chapter of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP). A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), and The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; 2009); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992).

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