RETHINKING RURAL LIVELIHOODS IN AFGHANISTAN

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Alternative Livelihoods: Substance or Slogan?

Labor and Human Capital,

UNDERSTANDING MARKETS IN AFGHANISTAN: A CASE STUDY OF CARPETS AND THE ANDKHOY CARPET MARKET

Industrial Organization,

Entangled lives: drug assemblages in Afghanistan's Badakhshan

This article, focussing on Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan, explores the lifeworld of drugs and their entangled connections with people, places and things. It follows the journeys of drugs from the farmers' fields, through their various stages of transportation, storage and transformation, until they arrive at the border with Tajikistan. The paper draws upon the notion of a 'drugs assemblage' - the interweaving of plants, institutions, actors, processes and resources through which drug journeys are managed and facilitated. Drugs are embedded in a web of social relations that connect farmers, labourers, shopkeepers, smugglers, brokers and border guards. Opium is central to the production of a Braudelian geography, fragmented yet connected, of trading routes, enclaves, choke points and border crossings. Drugs have played a role in transforming the 'disturbed' landscape of this remote borderland region, into a centre of innovation and improvisation, in which alienation and precarity co-exist alongside accumulation and the pursuit of 'freedom'

Higher-order conservative interpolation between control-volume meshes: Application to advection and multiphase flow problems with dynamic mesh adaptivity

© 2016 .A general, higher-order, conservative and bounded interpolation for the dynamic and adaptive meshing of control-volume fields dual to continuous and discontinuous finite element representations is presented. Existing techniques such as node-wise interpolation are not conservative and do not readily generalise to discontinuous fields, whilst conservative methods such as Grandy interpolation are often too diffusive. The new method uses control-volume Galerkin projection to interpolate between control-volume fields. Bounded solutions are ensured by using a post-interpolation diffusive correction. Example applications of the method to interface capturing during advection and also to the modelling of multiphase porous media flow are presented to demonstrate the generality and robustness of the approach

Entangled lives: drug assemblages in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan

This article, focussing on Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan, explores the lifeworld of drugs and their entangled connections with people, places and things. It follows the journeys of drugs from the farmers’ fields, through their various stages of transportation, storage and transformation, until they arrive at the border with Tajikistan. The paper draws upon the notion of a ‘drugs assemblage’ – the interweaving of plants, institutions, actors, processes and resources through which drug journeys are managed and facilitated. Drugs are embedded in a web of social relations that connect farmers, labourers, shopkeepers, smugglers, brokers and border guards. Opium is central to the production of a Braudelian geography, fragmented yet connected, of trading routes, enclaves, choke points and border crossings. Drugs have played a role in transforming the ‘disturbed’ landscape of this remote borderland region, into a centre of innovation and improvisation, in which alienation and precarity co-exist alongside accumulation and the pursuit of ‘freedom’

Reterritorialization of community forestry: Scientific forest management for commercialization in Nepal.

Nepal's community forestry is an example of a decentralized, participatory and autonomous development model. However, recent community forestry practices informed by the concept of scientific forestry in resource-rich and commercially lucrative Terai regions of Nepal have reversed community forestry gains. Scientific forestry, enforced through the Department of Forest has reproduced frontier power dynamics creating reterritorialization of community forestry through commercialization. Discouraging subsistence utilization and increasing commodification of high-value timber resources have been crucial in reconfiguring forest authority and territorial control. Moreover, the Scientific Forestry Programs have informally institutionalized rent-seeking practices at the local level. A local level, power nexus has developed among forest officials, contractors and community elites that systematically undermine local participation, allocation of resources for subsistence livelihoods and local autonomy. In effect, scientific forestry is recentralizing forest authority by legitimizing territorial control and the elite accumulation of benefits