5 Quotes by Fotini Christia

There is no clear evidence that Pakistan was involved in the Taliban's inception per se, but it certainly featured in the Taliban's transformation from a movement of clerics from within the Jihad driven by their local agendas and supported by their peers to an organized political unit with countrywide objectives.

In reality, there appears to be no alliance that is impossible because of identity differences. I relative power considerations dictate that two groups unite in an alliance, then the elites involved will always find some characteristic that they share and construct a justifying narrative around that attribute.

Najibullah abandoned all Marxist rhetoric and proceeded to change the name of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to Party of the Homeland (Hizb-i-Watan). The party was now open to "believing and practicing Muslims," and Najibullah put mullahs on the civil servant payroll.

Apart from the Croat-Muslim unifying narrative, the Ustashe also used overtly anti-Serb propaganda. They banned the Cyrillic alphabet, which is the Serb national alphabet, on April 25, 1941, and on May 3, 1941 passed legislation that viewed religious conversion for the Orthodox as the only way to grant them equal rights before the law.

Errors in diplomacy, stemming from faulty understanding of the origins of intergroup alliances and the causes of within-group instability, have undoubtedly led to the perpetuation of these wars and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.