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Paper long abstract:

Based on field research in Bamyan/Afghanistan, the paper discusses constructions of legitimacy concerning the administration of justice as an indicator of peace.

The now officially peaceful province of Bamyan, whose political order has been characterised by many regime changes as well as various violent local and regional conflicts in the last decades, provides a rich setting to question official categorisations of various forms of war and peace, and their construction through a qualitative analysis of their indicators. This paper will do so by tracing strands of legitimacy found in practices of dispute parties concering the current, pluralistic administration of dispute management, and their relation to past and current constellations of public power.

While legitimacy of the administration of justice is usually treated as a feature of peace, this analysis will challenge this assertion and hence one of the qualitative indicators used to draw lines between war and peace.