University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 2011 | Issue 1 Article 6 An Economic Interpretation of the Pashtunwali Tom Ginsburg
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf Recommended Citation Ginsburg, Tom () "An Economic Interpretation of the Pashtunwali," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 2011: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol2011/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Chicago Legal Forum by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. An Economic Interpretation of the Pashtunwali Tom Ginsbur Law as we know and conceive of it is a product of the modern state. Most of us, especially in law schools, think of rules as be- ing primarily enacted by the legislature or administrative agen- cies; we think of courts as the primary adjudicative institutions; and we think of enforcement as being a product of state bureau- crats, including police and prosecutors. As has been long recog- nized, however, this concept of legal centrism is radically incom- plete, even within the zone of the nation-state.' It is an especially poor fit when one examines groups at the periphery of nation- states who operate quasi-legal systems of varying degrees of effi- cacy and persistence. These systems provide a good deal of "order without (state) law."2 This Article analyzes the Pashtunwali, the tribal code of the Pashtuns, from a political-economy perspective. The Pashtuns are the ethnic group of some forty million that occupies a large swath of territory across Afghanistan and Pakistan that has never been completely integrated into a state.3 The decade-long conflict in Afghanistan has brought renewed attention to the Pashtuns, whose members are prominent in both the pseudogov- ernment and the Taliban.