Building What We Don't Have: A Strategy for a Hazara Unifying Institution
In an earlier piece on this site, we argued that one of the reasons Hazara unity has been so hard to achieve is the absence of a unifying institution - a body whose authority crosses sub-groups and is accepted as the convening structure for the whole community. Saying that out loud is one thing. Proposing how to build one is harder, and most of what gets proposed in this space is either a manifesto, a fundraising pitch, or a vision document in a tone nobody who has lived inside Hazara organisational politics finds credible.
This article is an attempt at something more sober. It asks what a unifying institution would actually have to do, why previous attempts failed, what design principles seem necessary if we try again, and what is realistically achievable in the next five to ten years. It is written from inside the community, not from above it. The honest case for trying is that the alternative is another generation of fragmented effort, and we have had several already.
What Such an Institution Would Actually Have to Do
Calls for "unity" tend to be vague because they describe a feeling rather than a function. If we are serious about building something, we have to be specific about the work.
A genuine unifying institution would need to take on, over time, several distinct functions. It would have to support cultural preservation: language, oral history, music, the documentation of valley-by-valley practice before the people who carry it pass on. It would have to coordinate advocacy so that the same governments are not approached by three Hazara delegations in three months with overlapping and sometimes contradictory asks. It would have to fund and direct education, both inside Afghanistan where access has been catastrophically rolled back, and among Hazara communities abroad whose children risk losing the language and historical memory within two generations.
It would have to build a knowledge archive: a place where the scholarly and journalistic record of the Hazara experience is collected, organized, and made accessible, so researchers, lawyers, and our own community do not have to start from scratch every time a question is asked. It would have to develop leadership: not anointing leaders, but creating conditions under which younger people from across the sub-groups encounter each other, work on real problems together, and form the relationships future leadership will rest on. It would have to handle charitable distribution with enough transparency that a donor in Mississauga or Denver can give to relief in Hazarajat without wondering which faction's network is taking the cut. And it would, eventually, have to convene the community for collective decisions on questions where our voice matters and currently fractures.
That is a lot. The instinct to build one organisation that does everything is itself part of the problem we are trying to solve.
Why the Previous Attempts Fractured
The reference case is Hizb-e-Wahdat. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the various Shia and Hazara political-military factions in Afghanistan came together, with significant Iranian encouragement, into a single party intended to represent the community at the national table. For a brief moment, it worked. By the mid-1990s, it had split into several factions and what would become the Mohaqiq wing, each anchored in different regional bases, different external sponsors, and different theories of what the community needed.
The lessons sit in that history and they are lessons about structure, not personality.
First, a political party is the wrong vehicle for a unifying institution. A party exists to compete for power. As soon as power becomes contestable, the internal lines already in the community - regional, sub-group, sectarian - become the lines along which the party splits. Asking a political-military party to also serve as the cultural, charitable, and convening body of a people guarantees that every internal disagreement, including ones unrelated to politics, runs through the party's fault lines.
Second, regional anchoring of a nominally national body produces predictable fragmentation. When the headquarters, the dominant figures, and the everyday operations are visibly rooted in one region, members from other regions read it, accurately, as that region's institution wearing a national label. This is not a failure of generosity on their part. It is a correct reading of organisational reality.
Third, leader-cult structures cannot survive their leader. When an institution's legitimacy is tied to one founding figure, it does not outlive the figure intact. It splits along the lines of who that person trusted and which lieutenants refuse to accept which successor. A body designed to last has to be designed so that no individual is structurally indispensable.
Fourth, dependence on external sponsorship distorts internal accountability. Money and political backing from outside the community come with strings, however informal. Any institution that takes that backing finds its priorities slowly shaped by it, and its members eventually notice. The next attempt has to be funded primarily from within.
These are not complaints about the people involved in earlier efforts. Many were serious people working under impossible conditions. The point is that the structures themselves carried the seeds of their own fracture.
Design Principles for What Could Work
If the failures were structural, the answers have to be structural too.
Cross-sub-group governance written into the structure, not assumed. A board, a council, an editorial body - whatever the form - has to have explicit, visible representation from the major regional and sub-group communities, written into founding documents, with rotation rules that prevent any one sub-group from holding the chair for consecutive terms. The test, the same one we named in the earlier article, is whether a Behsudi family accepts a Jaghori chair, and a Jaghori family accepts a Sheikh Ali chair, on competence rather than origin. If the structure does not pass that test on paper, it will not pass it in practice.
Transparent processes the community can see. Decisions, finances, appointments, and disagreements need to be visible. Communities under pressure are correctly suspicious of opaque institutions. The cost of transparency is high - it slows things down and exposes internal disagreement - but the alternative is the cycle we already know, where rumours about who is benefiting from what undermine legitimacy long before any formal split.
Neutrality on internal sectarian and lineage disputes. A unifying body cannot adjudicate between Twelver and Ismaili interpretations, between Sayyid and non-Sayyid claims, or between religious authority lines. The moment it tries, it stops being unifying. Its scope has to be bounded to work that does not require taking those positions.
Federated rather than monolithic. This is the most important shift. Instead of a single institution trying to do everything, the realistic structure is a constellation of complementary specialist bodies that recognise each other and coordinate. A cultural and historical archive. An advocacy coordinating body. An educational fund. A research and policy body. Each with its own narrower mission, its own governance, and its own legitimacy to defend. They affiliate through shared principles and a light coordinating structure, not through merger. The federation can fracture in one place without bringing down the whole.
Digital-first and geographically distributed. The Hazara community now lives in Quetta, Bamyan, Kabul, Mashhad, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Mississauga, San Diego, Denver, London, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and dozens of other cities. Any institution headquartered in one of them will be perceived as that city's institution. The realistic answer is bodies whose primary infrastructure is digital, whose governance meets across time zones by design, and whose physical events rotate. The desire for a building with a sign on the door is understandable. But a single building somewhere is a structural argument for a particular community's primacy and we have lived through the consequences of that.
Generational time horizon. Project-cycle thinking - two-year grants, three-year plans, five-year campaigns - is the wrong unit. Communities that have built durable institutions did so over forty to a hundred years of repeated, often boring work. Anyone proposing to deliver Hazara institutional unity inside a single funding cycle is, with respect, not describing the actual problem.
Boring institutional work over charismatic leadership. This is the hardest cultural shift to engineer. Writing minutes, keeping books, drafting bylaws, training the next cohort of board members, archiving documents, running honest elections - this is what makes institutions last. Charismatic founders make institutions visible. Institutional discipline makes them durable. The next generation of Hazara institution-building has to value the second more than the first, even when the first is more rewarding.
What Is Actually Possible in the Next Five to Ten Years
Given those principles, the realistic agenda is not "build the institution." It is to build, in parallel, several pieces of what an eventual federation would look like, and let them prove themselves before any larger structure is attempted.
A federation of existing reputable bodies. There are already credible Hazara organisations, particularly outside Afghanistan - the Hazara Council of Australia, organizations in Canada, the UK, Germany, the US, and Pakistan, alongside long-standing bodies in Quetta. None speaks for the whole community, but several are well-run and trusted within their reach. A first step is voluntary affiliation around shared principles - cross-sub-group governance, transparency, neutrality on sectarian dispute, common standards for charitable accounting. No merger. No surrender of autonomy. Just a public alignment that creates a recognisable common space.
A neutral cultural and historical archive. The Hazara have a model for this in Faiz Mohammad Katib Hazara, whose nineteenth and early twentieth century historical writing has been read by Hazaras across every regional line for over a century, because the work itself is good enough that nobody can dismiss it. The contemporary equivalent is a digital archive of texts, oral histories, photographs, dialect recordings, and primary documents - operated to a scholarly standard, accessible to anyone, governed by a board that visibly represents all the major sub-groups. Done well, it becomes the resource everyone uses, which over time makes it institutionally important without anyone having to argue for its importance.
A respected research and policy body. Modelled loosely on what serious policy institutes do for other communities: analysis on the situation in Hazarajat, on Hazara communities abroad, on legal and human rights questions, on economic and educational data. Work credible enough that journalists, governments, and the community itself reference it. The legitimacy of this kind of body comes from the quality of its output, not from claiming to speak for anyone.
A common educational fund or scholarship program with cross-regional governance. A pooled fund with a board explicitly drawn from multiple regions and sub-groups, transparent selection criteria, and published outcomes. Even at modest scale, this builds the muscle memory of cross-sub-group decision-making on real stakes. Hazara students benefit. The community gets practice running a shared institution.
An annual convening that is real, not symbolic. Not a gala, not a one-day conference with speeches and photographs. A multi-day working gathering, rotating between cities, with substantive working groups, transparent agendas, published outputs, and a participant base visibly drawn from across the regional and sub-group lines. The first few will be imperfect. The point is to make convening a habit, not an event.
None of these requires the whole community to agree on a single institution before any of it can begin. Each can be started, in some form, by the people willing to start it, and each can prove its value or fail to.
What This Will Require From the Community
There is no version of this that does not require things from us as participants.
It requires showing up to bodies whose first iterations will be imperfect, rather than waiting for the perfect institution that never arrives. It requires patience with the slow work of cross-regional governance, which by design is harder than letting one trusted group decide. It requires accepting governance that does not always favour your sub-group, on the understanding that the same governance, applied to others, protects you the next time. It requires resisting the temptation to fork at the first disagreement. Communities that fork at every disappointment do not build institutions; they accumulate organisations.
It requires, above all, willingness to support work that does not centre our own region, and institutions whose chair this year is not from our valley. That is not small. It is what unity actually costs.
A Note on This Site
It would be dishonest to write this piece without naming where Hazara United fits. This site is one attempt at one piece of what is needed, the cultural and informational layer: writing, history, advocacy explainers, a record. It does not claim to be the institution. No single project should. We expect to sit alongside better, more specialised efforts that we are not equipped to do, and that should not run through us. The honest goal is to do this piece well enough that, when a wider federation does emerge, this work is part of what it draws on.
The institution we need will not arrive whole. It will be built, in pieces, by people who agree on enough to work together and accept that they will not agree on everything. That has been the path for every people who has built one. There is no reason it cannot be ours.
This is the second piece in a short series on unity within the Hazara community. The first, "The Lines Inside the Line: Hazara Sub-Groups, Internal Division, and the Question of Unity," diagnosed the structural and historical reasons internal divisions persist. This piece responds to one of the diagnoses in that article: the absence of a unifying institution.