Mi 05 Jun 2013 | 18:15–20:00

Strengthening Administrative Education in Afghanistan

Wolf Plesmann; Comments: Christian Boulanger, Antonio de Lauri, Julie Billaud

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Room 213, Unter den Linden 9, 10099 Berlin

Presentation by

  • Wolf Plesmann, Head of Project, "Strengthening of Public Administration Education in Afghanistan," Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH,


followed by short comments from

  • Christian Boulanger, Forum Transregionale Studien & Law and Society Institute Berlin
  • Antonio de Lauri, Rechtskulturen Fellow 2012/2013
  • Julie Billaud, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Rechtskulturen Fellow 2011/2012


Today’s Afghanistan is characterized by geographic, ethnic, and religious fragmentation. Also, several different legal systems – traditional law, Islamic law and modern law – exist side by side. Not only because corruption is pervasive, most people rely on informal structures rather than on state authorities to solve their problems. The establishment of an effective public administration remains a key challenge. Only a very small skilled staff exists that is capable of developing and applying the necessary procedures and establish an effective administration based on the rule of law. Against this backdrop, the German Government has been cooperating with the Afghan government to set up a more efficient public administration with a capacity for to deliver services to its citizens. The objective is to lay the foundations for standardized basic and further training for senior-level public service staff in Afghanistan. The talk will provide, from a practitioner’s perspective, an insight into the current work of the program "Strengthening of Public Administration Education in Afghanistan". It will focus on a particular feature of the program, namely the attempt to create a network of Faculties of Public Administration in Afghanistan and to connect these institutions to partner institutions in India and Turkey. The talk will also address the challenge of developing an administrative terminology in the face of the dominance of the English language in development cooperation, on the one hand, and the existence of two official Afghan languages (Dari and Pashtu), on the other.

The discussion event is jointly organized by the Law and Society Institute Berlin and Rechtskulturen, a research and fellowship program at the Forum Transregionale Studien and a project of the Berlin Research Network Recht im Kontext (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

For updated information on the event, please visit

ICS Export

Alle Veranstaltungen