ABSTRACT
For at least a millenium, the Pashto-speaking people have preserved their independence and flourished through a tribal political organisation in their homeland straddling the present Afghanistan-Pakistan international border. The tribal organisation of these people – more commonly called Afghans to the west, Pathans to the east, and Pushtuns/Pakhtuns on both sides of this border – today provides them not merely with a distinct cultural or ethnic identity, but, especially for those in the central homeland nearest the border, with a form of polity alternative to that of the state. Tribal institutions and norms, just as those of a state, can and do perform the political tasks of interest mediation, dispute resolution, and military organisation. In a changing political environment the Pashtun tribes have preserved their own forms of organisation and even today remain independent, more or less, of the states within whose boundaries they now reside. Their political independence is expressed through the autonomous enforcement of the tribal legal order -the Pashtunwali. Inter-polity relations between these tribes and neighbouring governments have been structurally characterised by their fundamentally different kinds of legal orders, based respectively on the Pashtunwali and central state institutions and ideologies.
