Herat School of Security-I

Herat School of Security-I (HSS-I)
18-19 November 2015-Kabul, Afghanistan

The end of the Cold War is considered as a turning point in security studies. Given significant changes in the International System, conventional approaches to studying and analyzing security issues including the security definition, its scope and level of analysis have witnessed widespread revision. The need for theoretical rethink and appropriate explanation for different aspects of the security conception in new area of international relations resulted in foundation of numerous theoretical schools. Given our region particularly Afghanistan is suffering from serious security threats, the security conception is growing more and more important as an essential discourse. While the security has regional backgrounds, dealing with such issue using non-regional mechanisms has had and will have many challenges.

Generally speaking, security theories and political sciences have been the work of western academics. Following series of the Herat Security Conference and given that literature and mysticism constitute the cultural identity of our region as well as being the uniting factor for nations of this cultural sphere, Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS) aims to explore the so-called Herat Security Discourse. Presenting a comprehensive and multi-dimensional definition of the security and utilizing regional level of analysis as well as Persian and Pashto literature and Khorasan’s mysticism, Herat School aims to introduce a security discourse that is based on ethics, individual cognizance and collective tolerance; the principles that our literature and mysticism have formed their foundations in addition to the fact that these principles have been the key to peaceful coexistence and cultural tolerance in our multicultural region.

As mentioned earlier, unfortunately the Eastern people in general have not taken noticeable action to theorize Eastern humanities and mystical subjects. Thus, sporadic social characteristics of our mysticism and literature have not become coherent or appropriately structured yet.

The Herat International Conference is a unique opportunity to bring up the security discourse for it gathers theoretical and practical intellectuals of politics and security from around the world in Herat, the province which was known as the pearl of Khorasan, ruled by mysticism-based kingdoms.

Using firstly the perspectives of Afghan intellectuals and commentators and secondly the intellectuals of our cultural region and finally global thinker, we hope this opportunity will lead us to produce Herat Security Discourse.