St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

76 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 5. Паттерны политической жизни Афганистана и трансграничных регионов... varieties. The experience of Herat and, until recently, the northern regions of Afghanistan (Mazar-i-Sharif, etc.), shows that a revival may also occur in a localised manner. In these and other cases, the influence of the external factor, viz., the Western and Soviet ones as well as the Asian impact have affected the Afghan experience of localised as well as of regional, sectorial and other modernizations. The study of the modernization phenomenon in its Afghan version in the last 100 years (the 1910’s-2010’s) demonstrates that the reform projects of the first third of the 20th century were not supported by the relevant recruitment policy and qualified personnel as well as by adequate financial resources; while the objective difficulties were multiplied by the adventurism of the ruling circles with the external interference preventing the unfolding of reforms and exploiting the benefits of Afghanistan’s geographical position at a crossroads of trade and military-strategic routes. However, even in the pre-WWII and WWII years, the nascent Afghan entrepreneurial class, with the support of the new Musahiban dynasty, managed to diversify patterns and methods of trade and economic activity. The subsequent reformist programmes of M. Daoud, the leftist radicals of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and their opponents from the Islamist, traditionalist and liberal camps were interrupted due to the difficult internal political situation and outbreaks of civil war as well as due to the scramble of external forces for influence in this part of Asia. It was only at the beginning of the 21st century that large-scale peacekeeping initiatives and integration projects emerged: the Istanbul process, which provides for the pacification of Afghanistan by the efforts of its neighbours through economic, cultural and other interaction with this problem state, the Chinese One Belt, One Road project aimed at creating a powerful infrastructure and multilateral cooperation in Eurasia. However, the geo-economic and international political imperatives of these projects do not yet guarantee the full-scale entry of Afghanistan into this field of cooperation, but this is the most promising path to stability and progress. В. С. Бойко (Алтайский государственный педагогический университет / Алтайский государственный университет, Барнаул, Россия) Проблемы и противоречия модернизации Афганистана в XX — начале XXI вв. 1 Цель данного выступления — характеристика феномена модернизации в Афганистане и причин возникновения афганского «тупика» в контексте 1 Данный материал подготовлен при поддержке РГНФ/РФФИ (проект № 15-01- 00440).