The paper explores the long-term developments and dynamics in Afghanistan, which enabled Taliban to capture state August 2021. It suggests that Taliban’s success was by failure of international intervention build legitimate authority Afghanistan. Three factors contributed this failure: First, different actors were part country pursued competing agendas, especially with ‘War on Terror’ undermini...

Personnel management at the top of terrorist groups presents a puzzle. Sub-commanders act off message reasonably often, angering powerful backers. When this happens terrorist group leaders have every incentive—and typically the means—to kill the offending subcommander. Yet we often observe group leaders firing sub-commanders instead, despite the fact that doing so allows the sub-commanders an o...

During recent years, informal money service providers, or hawaladars, have gained an enhanced role as an important informal institution and key economic agents in Afghanistan. The hawala system, handling both financial transfers and currency exchange, was important in Afghanistan even before the war. But during the long period of conflict, and especially under the Taliban regime, the hawala mar...

Newer parts of sex chromosomes, neo-sex chromosomes, offer unique possibilities for studying gene degeneration and sequence evolution in response to loss of recombination and population size decrease. We have recently described a neo-sex chromosome system in Sylvioidea passerines that has resulted from a fusion between the first half (10 Mb) of chromosome 4a and the ancestral sex chromosomes. I...