Hi Eden,
I spent about a year and a half working on a database for CIDA that tracked Afghanistan in the early part of the war there. The person who worked with was an Afghan doctor who had grown up in the refugee camps of Pakistan and was now living in Canada. We spent a lot of time talking about what the political structure of the state should be leading up to the Loya Jirga of 2003. We both hoped that it would come out as a moderately strongish central government with the King's grandson as the new King and head of state, but where the tribes would have a lot of power both nationally and locally.
Yup, and it also meant that the central government had to persuade, rather than try to order, the tribes. In some ways, at least in terms of power, the tribes are the equivalent of provincial/state governments in a confederated system.
Agreed; it's also why I made that point about thinking of "stability" using the metaphor of homeostasis (from biology) rather than motionlessness or absolute predictability (from Newtonian physics). Anyway, I can't think of a single society that is "violence free", so that is, IMHO, a red herring. What societies have is a variable tolerance for and conventions for the practice of violence.
Well, personally, I believe that there is ample evidence to show that "governments" of any form can and have operated against the best interests of the population they claim to represent / govern. Then again, the same is pretty much true of any form of human organization. As an historical note, "government" in the sense of a centralized authority, is a quit recent invention in species terms - it only goes back about 12,000 years or so. As a species, we have had governance (not government) for most of our history (~2.2 million years if we only go back to H. Erectus and H. Habilis), but this type of governance was based around kinship systems - clans and tribes if you will - and used oral history and tradition as its "laws". I don't find it surprising that in some places in the world, we are "going back" to this type of governance system .
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