The study explores intellectual capabilities and/or knowledge acquisition exercises particularly the knowledge of politics in Afghanistan’s higher education. It explicitly interrogates the factors that affected and conditioned the intellectual capabilities and/or political knowledge of the students between 2001 to 2021 in Afghanistan. The study has opted for a qualitative method of semi-structured interviews with several former and present political science lecturers and students in Afghanistan. The study has adopted the nonprobability methods of purposive and snowball/referential sampling for data collection and deductive coding for data analysis. The analysis determines that the science of politics has played a passive role in socio-political circumstances in Afghanistan and has been subservient to the sociocultural structures and belief systems of the country. Thereby, it failed to function as an intellectual and reformist institution paving the knowledge acquisition exercise and/or nurturing intellectual capabilities. Given its passive and subservient nature, on the one hand, the knowledge of politics at the universities is compressed and bound by the dominant structures and belief systems such as ethnicity and radical Islamism, and on the other hand, the traditional and unqualified aspirations and mentalities perpetuated and dominated the political circumstances. Consequently, exploring the conditioning and shrinking factors of political knowledge/intellectual capabilities in Afghanistan’s higher education led the study to possible arrangements/reforms in the organization of political knowledge to repel the domination of sociocultural structures and belief systems, and equip the students with relevant and contextual knowledge of politics and form their intellectual capabilities.

Authors:
Mohammad Ajmal Behmanish, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

About the Presenter(s)
Mr. Mohammad Ajmal Behmanish is currently a Ph.D. Scholar and a research associate at TU Darmstadt. His research interests are higher education studies, political studies, and sociology of knowledge.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Thursday Schedule

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