Introducing his new book titled, "Constitutional Law and the Politics of Ethnic Accommodation: Institutional Design in Afghanistan" Dr. Bashir Mubasher discusses why the political institutions set up by the Constitution of 2004 failed to accommodate Afghanistan's ethnic groups and why the Republic regime collapsed in 2021.
Dr. Bashir argues that the Constitution of 2004 failed to achieve ethnic accommodation due to primarily inter-institutional and intra institutional incongruences among many factors. For example, the electoral systems for presidential and parliamentary elections encouraged different behaviors. The presidential system encouraged cross-ethnic coalitions, but the parliamentary system did not. This made it difficult to sustain cross-ethnic coalitions across elections.
In addition, inclusive cabinets during the republic regime was due to the dependence of the President to the oversight and confidence of the parliament. However, the president had a lot of authority to bypass the parliament when making laws. This meant that laws and policies were not always inclusive.
Bashir Mobasher argues that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to ethnic accommodation and concludes by calling for a nuanced theory of constitutional design that takes into account the specific context of each country. This would allow countries to keep the parts of their constitutions that work well and fix the parts that do not.
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