Towards an inclusive, lasting, and sustainable peace: recognize, legitimize, and empower Afghan non-dominant minorities

"Afghanistan is a “nation of minorities,” as described by Nassim Jawad, an Afghan academic. Various ethnic, religious, and sect minorities have lived in the country, reflecting Afghanistan’s geographical location and sociocultural historiography as the crossroad and melting pot of many empires and civilizations in Central Asia. In its modern state formation, as Afghanistan has become more distinguishable along ethnic lines, nondominant or marginal and smaller minorities have been absorbed either within the larger groupings of language, ethnicity, and religion/sect or have been alarmingly and deliberately neglected. This reality has given rise to a new set of societal problems in the advancing Afghanistan milieu. Historically, the absence of inclusive mechanisms for the protection and representation of rights of non-dominant minorities has seriously excluded and marginalized them from Afghan polity and society. The sad picture is a universal dilemma in a modern world that has become one of the key issues in globalization. However, the Afghanistan experience has its own unique story or historicity. Afghanistan’s last four decades of war and violence have significantly restructured and transformed state-society relations, further exacerbating the vulnerability of these non dominant minorities. In post-2001 Afghanistan, there have been several important citizen rights embedded in its constitution, de jure, protecting the rights of minorities. However, de facto, non-dominant minorities continue to suffer from a lack of political representation, service delivery, and economic development. "