Theoretical Categories for Analysing the Political Thinking Structures of the Taliban

Abstract

This article aims to propose a set of theoretical categories for analyzing political thinking structures distributed by the Taliban after the war in Afghanistan. It includes three groups of ideal types that enable researchers to identify and classify different aspects of these structures used to formulate legitimacy claims. They are religious and political; tribal and post-tribal thinking; nativism, contra-acculturation, vitalism, and autonegativism. Although the scope of their application significantly exceeds the exploration of the indicated research field, they are useful to understand the changes in the contemporary political scene in Asia and carefully forecast the direction of changes in the Afghan political system. These structures are used by the Taliban to generate social legitimacy for their rule and the shaped political system, i.e., to gain support for the current government from the ruled population and to model the acceptance of its policies, institutions, and values. They constitute specific legitimacy claims that, apart from the use of repression and cohesion of the ruling elite, form one of the stability pillars of a political regime. They can be treated as legitimizing structures underlying the constructed political order.