From Social Alignment to Social Control: Reporting the Taliban in Afghanistan

In many settings, witnesses can report wrongdoing to internal authorities such as officials within an organization or to external authorities such as the police. We theorize this decision of where to report as rooted in the policing of group boundaries, as the use of different reporting channels symbolically affirms or disaffirms affiliation with different social categories. As such, both witnesses and other social actors have an interest in where witnesses report. We evaluate this theory using villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where witnesses could report externally (e.g., to the national police) or internally (e.g., to village elders). We show how responses to wrongdoing arose from the interaction between self and others’ attitudes toward the Taliban, and we reveal how reporting can be simultaneously punitive for the wrongdoer and affiliative for the category to which the wrongdoer belongs.

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