The dramatic images from Bagram Airbase depicting desperate Afghans attempting to flee the country following NATO’s withdrawal and the subsequent collapse of its army in the face of the Taliban’s rapid advance have come to symbolize the failure of state-building interventions in so-called failed or fragile states. Since the end of the Cold War, places such as Afghanistan, East Timor, Mali, DR Congo, Somalia, Colombia, and South Sudan have been portrayed as breeding grounds for a litany of interconnected threats to global security, including terrorism, transnational crime, drug trafficking, epidemics, and illegal migration. It has been argued that the root cause of these global threats is the inability or unwillingness of rulers to govern in accordance with supposedly universal norms of statehood, such as democracy, respect for human rights, the rule of law, rational-legal bureaucracy, and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The international community has constructed a formidable intervention apparatus, often referred to as the “security-development nexus,” to counter these perceived threats under the banner of “state-building.” However, in many instances, interventions have fallen short of their lofty goals, with the failure of the US-led mission in Afghanistan serving as a spectacular example.

As the dust settles on the failure in Afghanistan, the lingering question is, why did NATO’s and the wider international community’s mission fail so spectacularly, despite the enormous resources deployed and the support of the world’s most powerful military alliance? Florian Weigand’s book Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan addresses this question. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research and state-of-the-art theory, the book meticulously explores how authority and legitimacy were either produced or were absent in Afghanistan during the intervention of the US-led alliance. This question has troubled political leaders throughout history, be they imperialists, colonizers, kings, diplomats, or presidents. Therefore, the findings and analyses of this book extend beyond Afghanistan and should interest scholars across various fields within the social sciences.

The main argument of the book posits that interactive dignity is the key factor determining whether people consider an authority to be legitimate. Weigand argues that what matters is how authorities actually govern, with day-to-day interactions between authorities and people being particularly crucial. Basic requirements for authorities to forge legitimacy include accessibility, predictable procedures, and, crucially, the treatment of people with dignity as equal citizens: people simply want to be treated with respect and fairness. Weigand contends that this contrasts sharply with the view that legitimacy can be constructed through external attempts to engineer a legitimate political order, which underpinned the intervention in Afghanistan. It also challenges the notion that the Taliban are viewed as legitimate because of their interpretation of Islam. In short, during the international intervention between 2001 and 2021 in Afghanistan, legitimacy was not produced through abstract ideals such as democracy, the rule of law, the respect for human rights, local tradition, and religion. Instead, it was, first and foremost, a down-to-earth and dynamic phenomenon shaped by people’s experiences and interactions with authorities.

Waiting for Dignity is an impressive book in many ways. It is well structured, with a robust approach and research design, resting on an impressive corpus of original empirical material—primarily 498 interviews conducted with a wide range of people across Afghanistan. The book engages with key debates and issues surrounding political order in conflict-affected spaces. Underpinning these outstanding qualities is a remarkably consistent theoretical framework strongly inspired by the most interesting aspects of Weber’s and, to a lesser extent, Bourdieu’s theories on legitimacy and authority. Using a case-study approach and a comparative research design, the book explores the key issues of legitimacy and authority among different groups of people and in different places in Afghanistan. It systematically explores the legitimacy of key authorities: formal state authorities, warlords and strongmen, the Taliban, and community authorities. One by one, Weigand examines how they justified their right to govern and how they were perceived by ordinary Afghans. His insistence on redirecting the focus from external assumptions of legitimacy to what the people of Afghanistan think about legitimacy and authority is commendable.

The book’s findings and analyses are striking, highly interesting, and relevant. Let’s begin with the question of why the international community’s attempt to build a state in Afghanistan failed. Ultimately, Weigand asserts, it failed because the institutions they constructed largely failed to treat the citizens of Afghanistan with dignity. The formal state authorities reconstructed by the international community, such as the Afghan National Police, the Afghan Parliament, Provincial Councils, community development councils, and the court system, were, by and large, considered illegitimate authorities. According to Weigand, people perceived the behavior of state authorities as corrupt, extractive, unjust, and therefore illegitimate. Furthermore, the legitimacy of the formal state authorities was thoroughly compromised by the collateral damage caused by the US-led alliance’s counterterrorism operations. This is a sobering assessment, not least because respondents expressed a widespread faith in the idea of the state and a shared sense of national Afghan identity. The international and Afghan would-be state-builders failed to leverage these vital ideological components of public authority.

There were exceptions, of course, and legitimacy varied from place to place. For instance, in the cities, people used the formal court system more and participated much more in elections than in rural areas. However, this did not necessarily translate into substantive legitimacy. People sometimes used the formal court systems because they had no alternative. Meanwhile, rural people often did not participate in elections because they lived in Taliban-controlled territories. Although people mostly viewed the courts as corrupt, most did not have strong views on members of parliament. Those who did have strong views saw them as dangerous and extractive warlords in cahoots with criminal networks. People also distrusted formal state institutions because they collaborated, relied on, and integrated former mujahideen warlords who had fought the Soviets, such as Atta Noor and Zahir Qadir, into the formal state apparatus. These warlords were viewed as extractive, corrupt, and outright dangerous, despite their family traditions as local rulers and their history as jihadis fighting against the Soviet occupation.

Another main reason for the failure of the state-building project in Afghanistan was the rise of the Taliban. During the two decades of international intervention, the authority and legitimacy of the Taliban grew slowly in rural areas. They claimed legitimacy by portraying themselves as jihadists fighting against foreign invaders and infidel government forces. They also relied on fear and violence, waging attacks in cities and other government-controlled areas to demonstrate the inability of state authorities to protect ordinary people. Nevertheless, in the areas they controlled and in contested areas, the Taliban were able to forge a modicum of legitimacy that, according to Weigand, was not based on ideology but rather on their ability to provide security and, especially, justice to people. The Taliban’s conflict-resolution mechanisms were particularly appreciated for their fairness and predictability compared to the government’s. Similarly, the people valued the swiftness and accessibility of the Taliban courts. In this respect, Weigand’s analysis supports Adam Baczko’s pioneering work on the Taliban courts (La guerre par le droit: Les tribunaux Taleban en Afghanistan, 2022). According to Baczko, the Taliban waged “war through justice”—that is, it was by providing more effective, accessible, predictable, and equitable justice than state authorities that the Taliban were able to gain the confidence of rural populations and install their juridical system. The combined weight of Weigand’s and Baczko’s findings and analyses lends credibility to Weigand’s core argument that authorities’ legitimacy depends on their daily interactions.

The book aligns itself with a growing field of scholarship that focuses on how public authority is constituted through everyday interactions in conflict-affected regions (e.g., Tobias Hagmann and Didier Péclard, “Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa,” Development and Change, 41(4), 2010; Christian Lund, “Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship,” Development and Change, 47(6), 2016). What this literature shares is a commitment to in-depth fieldwork to understand what forms of political order emerge in conflict-affected regions. Much of this work draws on legal pluralism and political sociology, particularly the theories of Weber and Bourdieu. Weigand’s book is an important contribution to this field. His arguments that predetermined concepts of the state are analytically futile and that boundaries between authorities are blurred echo key claims of this literature. Theoretically, his reflections on the differences between substantial and instrumental legitimacy are particularly interesting and demand attention.

Nevertheless, Weigand’s theory of interactive dignity as the key source of legitimate authority has its limits. He commendably points out that the abstract categories of legitimacy, coercion, and authority risk oversimplifying people’s perception of rulers. Yet, there appears to be a deeper issue with the theoretical explanation provided. For Weigand, ideology and its attendant values, whether Islam, tradition, or liberalism, have little to no bearing on legitimacy. Instead, what underpins interactive dignity—the all-important variable of legitimate authority—are basic values linked to human dignity. Hence, at the core of legitimate authority lies a supposedly universal set of values shared by humankind as a whole, including fairness and respect (to the extent that they are reflected in the behavior of authorities). Weigand claims that this is a contribution to existing theories of the sources of legitimate authority, particularly ideological values. Yet, Weigand’s theory of interactive dignity departs from his most important sources of inspiration, Weber and Bourdieu. For both authors, values are inherently cultural constructs that not only shape people’s subjective experiences of the world but also legitimize political authority and social structures. The point that daily interactions matter more to the creation of legitimate authority than political theorists like Weber and Bourdieu ascribe to them is well taken. However, Weigand’s claim that these interactions are much more important for the forging of legitimate authority than ideology in conflict-torn space seems to call for more research and theoretical elaboration.

These critiques notwithstanding, Waiting for Dignity is an impressive and deeply interesting book.