Coburn Monitors Afghanistan’s Presidential Election
Faculty member Noah Coburn has been monitoring Afghanistan’s upcoming presidential election with a team of Afghan researchers in Kabul.
Conducting research for the British think tank Chatham House, Coburn, a political anthropologist and author of Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan, tracked voters and candidates in the weeks leading up to the April 5 elections, monitored voting stations on election day, and has been interviewing voters about their experience at the polls. You can follow his observations on his Afghan Elections blog.
In a March 28 op-ed in The Washington Post, Coburn and co-author Ronald Neumann wrote: “Regardless of the efforts of the international community or the improving electoral bodies in Afghanistan, the April 5 elections will be corrupt, filled with fraud and marred by violence … but the inevitable failure to achieve a perfectly free and fair vote should not trump the primary U.S. goal of a peaceful transfer of power. Without such a peaceful transition, there is little hope for the future of Afghan democracy anyway.”
Coburn will speak on “The Legacy of U.S. Intervention” on Saturday, April 26, during one the many faculty-led events scheduled over President Mariko Silver’s Inauguration Weekend.