How would you react to this provocative scene? Call 911? Unfortunately, there is no response. You call the local police, but again no response. To reach your neighbors or somebody in the street would be a good idea but, unfortunately, you can’t see anybody nearby. You tell your family to stay upstairs. Should you try to communicate with the foreigners and explain that the land that they are trying to settle is your backyard? You open the door to the backyard and yell at those people without saying ‘hi’ since this is not a friendly visit. In fact it is an occupation of land which belongs to you.

‘What are you doing in my backyard?’ An elderly man in the group, presumably their leader, answers your question politely. ‘This a lovely land, on which we decided to settle and pass the summer with our families. Besides, who says this is your back yard?’ Then he commences to encircle the area with a fence.

How would you act under these circumstances? Accustomed to receiving security services from the state since you were born, you suddenly have to provide security for yourself and for your loved ones in your house, and for your property. Should you negotiate and seek a compromise since the elder in the group looks honorable and trustworthy? Would a compromise to share half of your backyard with these occupiers be a viable option? But the fact continues to be that this has been your backyard since you were born! Besides, how would your family react when they hear that you, desperately and cowardly, accepted to share half of your backyard with those occupiers?

At this point, there seems to be only one option open to you, to scare the foreigners away. You remember that you have a gun somewhere in your house. In the absence of a state to protect you, the use of a weapon would be justified since nobody, including your family, will blame you for applying violence. You are honorably trying to defend your property and the future of your children.

You find your rifle, load it and turn back to your yard to threaten those foreigners into leaving. Before the confrontation you ask yourself if there is anybody who can come to help you. Surely an ally and another rifle would make you more persuasive. If your answer is ‘no’ then you may feel some regret that you have lived such an individualistic way of life. Had you had a number of friends to call, who would be willing to die for your backyard with you, you would have had a better chance against the foreigners. Still, you take comfort in knowing that if you lose this armed confrontation and are killed, everybody will remember you as an honorable man who gave his life for his loved ones, property and the values he believed in.

One last question: if things do not go well, and you decide to use your rifle, will you shoot only at the armed men in the group or will you shoot, indiscriminately, to kill them all, including the women and children in the group? If you only aim to kill armed men, this would be honorable behavior, but when you leave the rest, specifically other unarmed men and their sons, they would come after you and your family, which means turning this confrontation in to a bloody and years-long feud. Moreover, if you get killed in this challenge, are you entirely sure that the occupiers will let your family leave from the house peacefully?

This scenario is completely hypothetical for many people, who currently live within a state. That is, for us, that state is defined as a political entity which:

State, in the modern sense, provides all these services stated above. By the same token, this is a true story for many others, who happen to be born in remote parts of states where there is no effective state authority. There are many rural territories in the world, in which the notion of state and all the faculties provided by the state are elusive.

Some Western experts assert that TRMEs in many parts of rural Afghanistan should be categorized as ungoverned¹ territories because of the absence of the notion of state or the existence of state capacity, or because the state faces significant challenges in establishing control. In contrast, I argue that TRMEs in these countries are not ungoverned. In fact, they have been governed territories for centuries, but with governance models different than state-centric. With particular focus on Afghanistan, I argue that defining TRMEs from a state-centric approach would be misleading and will fall short of accurately addressing current dynamics in these troubled regions.

For example, the Rand Report describes ungovernability through four variables:

Presumably then, the remedy for the current ungovernability in TRMEs would be to increase the interaction of the state with rural society, to strengthen the monopoly of the state over the use of violence to control and stabilize its claimed territory and borders, and to increase the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of its population and the sovereignty of the state in the international system. These state-centric solutions might be valid for territories where the population understands the notion of a state. In developed states, the actions of consolidating and monopolizing the legitimate right to use violence, providing security against internal/external threats, policing activities and justice, extracting resources from the population and territory, and creating institutions for the benefit of the population are naturally carried out by the state.³

But are these functions of the state also valid for geographically isolated, socioeconomically deprived, materially primitive and totally pastoral societies currently living in TRMEs within the remote parts of Afghanistan? Since the notion of state has not yet dawned in the minds of the residents of those territories, any state-centric approach to address the current dynamics in TRMEs would likely lead to false conclusions. Instead these dynamics revolve around the tribal order.⁴ In contrast, in TRMEs it is the tribal order that facilitates these services. Therefore neither any state-centric approach cannot accurately address any issue in TRMEs nor can the imposition of a purely state-centric solution can effectively resolve any structural problem in TRMEs. The particular characteristics of the TRMEs may vary, while the general characteristics of the TRMEs are the same regardless of time and space.

In this chapter, I will present the general characteristics of the TRMEs. I should stress one last note before beginning. As emphasized when explaining the notion of justice in the introduction, Western ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not universal. In contrast, other societies often have different notions of; rationality, appropriate moral codes of behavior, level of religious devotion, and value systems concerning many facets of socio-cultural life. Thus, what may appear ‘abnormal’ or ‘peculiar’ to an outsider may appear as self-evidently normal to a particular society. For this reason, one should strive to avoid imposing his/her ideals of normalcy on any issue regarding TRMEs. Gender issues in TRMEs – specifically gloomy news that the Western audience read/watch in Western media regarding the severe restrictions on women’s behavior – could be a good example to indicate primitiveness and savageness of the TRMEs when looked through the lenses of the Western value system. However, the namus concept which has been both religiously and traditionally justified, dictates that the sexual integrity and dignity of a woman, specifically an unmarried young lady, is not only her individual matter but also the matter of whole extended family, even tribe. According to this concept, the family/tribe should protect the chastity and social dignity of all women in the family/tribe against all kinds of physical and verbal threats. All women in a family/tribe represent the honor and reputation of that particular family/tribe. Sexual integrity of women is, thus, not a personal but a social phenomenon. The namus concept provides a collective security umbrella for each woman in the system. It regulates that all women, who feel the power of the family/tribe name behind their back, can travel safely, conduct daily routines at home or the in fields and establish social contacts with other individuals safely in the TRMEs, in which state-imposed laws are irrelevant. By means of this concept, women are also totally excluded from any form of punishment in intertribe/family disputes. Women can also neither be interrogated nor be put in prison for any crime. I observed personally many times that a group of female villagers – only accompanied by an old man – would go to the pastoral fields, which are miles away from the village, for agricultural work and would stay there safely for days. Also, on numerous occasions, I encountered female shepherds in the mountains who roam there for days safely with their livestock. That is why the Western audiences, who have been bombarded with the news about the Taliban’s treatment of women and the Taliban’s gender policies, would falsely conclude that the namus concept, which is in fact manipulated by the Taliban, is extremely primitive and wild, and should be challenged in every medium. Let me ask this question. We all have seen at least one picture of an Afghan lady who wears a dress called burqa, or chadri that covers the wearer’s entire face except for a small region of the eyes, which is covered by a concealing net. Is the practice of wearing burqa or chadri, a religious or a traditional one? And are the women in Afghanistan wearing them against their will or voluntarily? According to the current literature available for Western audience, women are forced to wear the burqa in public by the Taliban as the proper dress code of Sharia Law. Because, according to a Taliban spokesman, ‘the face of a woman is a source of corruption’ for men.⁵ A Taliban decree from 1996 also states, ‘if women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves, they will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia, and should never expect to go to heaven’.⁶ Then one may conclude that the practice of wearing a burqa is an imposed religious code by the Taliban for women in Afghanistan. Fully agreeing that the fear from the Taliban and religious motives would be a cause of wearing of burqa for many ladies in TRMEs, I would suggest that this is not necessarily true for all cases. I have been told by many ladies in TRMEs that they wear the burqa or burqa-like dresses voluntarily and for security reasons. That is, in an insecure environment in which they could be harassed, kidnapped or even raped, to cover their bodies wholly is the sole option to reduce their public visibility and thus not to attract too much attention. Some of them, interestingly, complained about the waning power of moral codes of behaviors, including the namus concept in their societies. Then, I came to conclude that firstly, there is a direct correlation between the prevalence of perceived insecurity in a given society and the dress preferences of women. And secondly, the namus concept should not be solely defined as a religious phenomenon but also may be defined as a traditionally instituted social phenomenon which has kept women in safety for centuries in TRMEs. I would also conclude that by means of relatively modern phenomena, which have emerged in the TRMEs (such as warlordism, modern criminal networks, and corrupted state-governed legal systems) pump insecurity into the environment – and thus women – are willing to be under the security umbrella of the namus concept. Nonetheless, in a TRME the social equilibrium of which is drastically imbalanced with exogenous inputs, and as a poor and powerless father of a young lady, how would you act in accordance with the namus concept if your daughter has been kidnapped by a local warlord? And to what extent would this concept deter this ill-intentioned local warlord?

I encounter in literature several times that there is an inclination to regard that the tribal order and the European feudal system as similar concepts. The society in TRMEs is, in fact, fundamentally different from European feudal society. In feudalism the land is distributed by the king with the royal authority to the chief. The chief (or lord) leases some parts of his lands to the other ‘estates’ such as knights, and knights assign their granted land to the middle level farmers to cultivate.⁷ Feudalism, a predominantly static and top-to-bottom social structure which gives rise to a hierarchy of rank, and is characterized by classes of militarized landholders and working landless peasants. The loyalty of those peasants to a specific lord is assigned and legitimized by the royal authority. The lord is expected to protect and provide justice and essential services to those landless peasants. Only the personal bonds...