Afghanistan has recently developed a Comprehensive National Migration Policy (CMP). In spite of the significance of migration in Afghan cultural, economic, political and social life – this impulse comes, not from the Afghan government or civil society, but from Europe, specifically from European Union Member States such as Germany, who received many of the 250,000 Afghans who applied for asylum in Europe in 2015. Perhaps inevitably the goals of Afghan migration policy are being set by European governments, who are in turn responding to their own domestic pressures and operating within particular ‘policy frames’. This paper explores the role played by the European Union and its Member States in shaping the migration policy of the Afghan government since the fall of the Taliban regime, but concentrating in particular on the process leading up to the CMP. Hussaini and Schuster examine who sets the agenda, whose interests are served (and whose ignored), and the challenges in developing and implementing policy in a country at war, and at the mercy of internal and external enemies.

Lisa Schuster / Reza Hussaini (City, University of London)