Follow-up Green Tea Morning Afghanistan

- THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED! -

The Heinrich-BöllStiftung would like to invite you for a working group meeting to follow-up on our discussion on the role of Afghan civil society actors in post-intervention Afghanistan. The meeting will be held in presence, on 27 June, 2022, from 9:00 to 11:00 at Schumannstrasse 8, 11017 Berlin.

Agenda:

• Recap of the Green Tea Morning event held on March 24th, 2022
• Round of sharing/ reflections by participants and identification of the main questions
• Discussion of the main questions (possibly) in working groups
• Summary and way forward

On 24th March 2022 the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, together with its Afghan partner organization The Liaison Office (TLO), had invited to a Green Tea Morning meeting to discuss the necessity for a continued support for Afghan Civil Society actors and organizations, and their initiatives in post-intervention Afghanistan. Ecology was discussed as one major thematic entry point through which Afghan CSOs are still able to work, also under the Taliban de-facto authority.

The Green Tea Morning plenum moreover strongly agreed that Afghanistan needs support that goes beyond humanitarian aid and that the situation in the country needs to regain its public attention internationally as well. The participants shared their observations, that Afghan CSO actors feel caught in between the international community’s decisions about future interventions in terms of project contents and funding modalities and the reaction of the Taliban representation to these decisions. While the international community continues to uphold adherence to democratic values as a precondition for diplomatic recognition, the Taliban representation is reportedly not ready to enter into negotiations conditionalized by human rights or access to education. Women’s rights remain at the center of the international value-based approach and likewise as the bargaining chip for international aid to Afghanistan. It is also observed that (still) existing local traditional structures are once again left out of decision-making fora albeit their local knowledge and their recommendations could facilitate the building up of frameworks for local solutions in terms of facilitation of aid delivery, networking with local power holders and accordingly lead to conflict transformation.

The suggested working group meeting will pick up on our debate around how to include Afghan actors, local traditional structures, alternative governance structures and civil society alike, and how they can contribute to a better understanding of the country and for that matter be supported. It will in particular look at the role of stakeholders from civil society, including media and academia, as well as of traditional local representatives. While putting the focus on the present situation in Afghanistan it will identify recommendations for the ongoing debate about future solutions. Accordingly, it also might contribute towards the ongoing evaluation of the 20 years intervention carried out by multiple actors.

We suggest to focus our conversations on the following questions:

• How can “local legitimacy building” in the current situation look like? What does it entail in terms of context as of locations and values? Which are the actors that need to be recognized?
• How can Afghan citizens (diaspora or in country) be better involved in evaluation efforts of the Afghanistan intervention from 2001 to 2021?  How can they network better to avoid replicating unsuitable intervention patterns? How can locally owned space for dialogue be created which is not perceived as driven by foreign forces? How can practitioners and policymakers be involved and consulted in such an exercise?
• What are the lessons learned for the international community from the events after the troop withdrawal?
• Keeping in mind the above questions, how can the international community, in particular civil society actors and how can Afghan diaspora support Afghanistan in a post-intervention era?

Looking at our dialogue process, we also would like to understand whether and how one or several working groups could continue to carry forward our discussion and what could be ways of feeding the outcomes of our meeting(s) into other upcoming networking processes and/or events?

To participate at the event, please register here.