Advocacy  

Why Persecution Fragments a People Instead of Uniting Them

The instinct, when a people is being killed for being who they are, is to expect that shared danger will pull them together. It feels like it should. Outside threat, common enemy, shared loss - the logic seems to write itself. And every people under sustained pressure is told, by their own most hopeful voices and by sympathetic outsiders, that the answer to what is being done to them is unity.

The harder truth, well-documented across the literature on collective trauma, is that sustained persecution usually does the opposite. It does not produce solidarity. It produces the contraction of trust. A community under existential threat does not expand its circle of cooperation outward. It draws the circle inward, again and again, until the only people inside it are the ones whose loyalty can be verified at close range. Family. Then clan. Then village. Then sub-group. Wider trust, the kind required to fund a national institution or accept leadership from a different valley, requires safety and continuity. Persecution removes both.

This is not a Hazara character flaw. It is what trust looks like when the cost of misplacing it has been catastrophic for a hundred and thirty years. Naming it accurately is a precondition for changing it. Denying it, or describing it as a moral failing of the community, makes both the pattern and the people inside it harder to help.

What Trust Actually Is and Why It Has a Range

Sociologists and political scientists have a useful phrase for this: trust radius. The trust radius of a person, or a community, is the distance out from the self at which you are willing to extend the kind of trust that involves risk - lending money without paperwork, accepting a stranger's account of a shared problem, voting for a leader from another region, contributing to an institution whose board you do not personally know.

Robert Putnam, writing in Bowling Alone and elsewhere about social capital in the United States, drew a distinction that travels well beyond his American case. He separated bonding social capital - the dense, inward trust of tight communities, the kind that helps you survive a crisis - from bridging social capital - the looser, wider trust that lets you cooperate with people unlike you, the kind required to build durable institutions. Communities under stress, Putnam observed, often have abundant bonding capital and very little bridging capital. The two are not the same thing and they do not produce each other automatically. A community can be intensely loyal inside its own walls and almost incapable of cooperating across them.

This is not a moral observation. It is a structural one. The conditions that build bonding capital - shared danger, dependence on close kin, the need to know exactly who is reliable - are the same conditions that make bridging capital expensive and risky. A family that survived the 1890s campaigns by trusting only its own clan was not being narrow-minded. It was being correct. The same calculation, repeated across generations, hardens into a working theory of the world: trust is a resource you spend carefully and the closer to home you spend it, the higher its return.

The literature on post-conflict societies has measured this directly. Studies of trust in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and post-Soviet republics have found that trust radius does not recover quickly after sustained violence, even when the violence stops. It contracts during the trauma and remains contracted for at least one full generation, often two or three. The institutions a society can sustain in that period are bounded by the trust radius available to it. Asking for institutions that exceed it produces the predictable failures.

Why Threat Pulls People Inward and Not Outward

The mechanism here has been studied from several angles and the answers converge.

Vamik Volkan, a Turkish-American psychiatrist who spent decades working with communities recovering from ethnic conflict, developed the concept of chosen trauma - a defining catastrophe that becomes a permanent reference point for a group's identity. Chosen trauma, Volkan argued, does not bind a community outward to other communities who might share its predicament. It binds the community to its own past, and through the past, to its own internal lineages of who suffered alongside whom. The bond is real and it is powerful. But it is mostly inward. The Armenian families who survived 1915 together carried that survival forward as a private inheritance among themselves, and the institutions that grew from it were largely ones their own networks could trust. The same has been observed in Jewish communities after pogroms and the Shoah, in Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge, in Rwandan Tutsi households after 1994. The trauma is shared in name. The trust it builds is local.

Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, described the same phenomenon at the individual level and showed how it scales up. People who have lived through prolonged threat develop a finely tuned sense of who is safe and who is not, and that sense becomes a permanent feature of how they read the world. Herman called this the survivor's altered sense of trust. It is not paranoia. It is the correct adaptation to an environment in which mistakes about who to trust were potentially fatal. What changes after the immediate threat ends is much less than people hope. The vigilance was useful. It does not switch off because the news cycle moves on.

When you scale Herman's individual mechanism up to a community, you get Volkan's pattern. A whole population of people whose families learned, the hard way, to verify trust at close range, will produce a society whose institutions naturally form along those same close-range lines. Marriages, businesses, charitable giving, political loyalty, religious affiliation - they all flow through the same narrow channels because those are the channels in which trust has historically been verifiable.

There is one more piece and it is uncomfortable. Edward Banfield, an American political scientist working in southern Italy in the 1950s, used the phrase amoral familism to describe a community in which trust effectively stopped at the boundary of the immediate family and where civic institutions - schools, parties, charities - struggled to function because nobody was willing to invest in cooperation with non-kin. Banfield's framing has been heavily criticised, and rightly so. He was condescending about the people he studied, he underestimated how much state predation and historical violence had produced the pattern, and he wrote as if this was a cultural deficit rather than a rational response to long centuries of being preyed upon by outsiders. The pattern he described is real. The explanation he offered is wrong. It is worth holding both of those things at once. We can take seriously what he saw, in southern Italy and in many other comparable cases, while rejecting the moralising frame he put on it.

The corrective comes from Diego Gambetta, whose work on Sicily a generation later showed exactly this. Gambetta argued that the contracted trust radius in Sicily was not the cause of Sicily's problems. It was the rational adaptation to the conditions Sicilians had lived under: a state that did not protect them, a series of foreign rulers whose interests ran against theirs, a long history in which the only reliable protection was kin and the only verifiable institution was the local network. The mafia, Gambetta argued in The Sicilian Mafia, did not arise because Sicilians lacked civic virtue. It arose because, in the absence of a state that would enforce contracts and protect property, somebody had to. The contracted trust radius was the substrate on which everything else was built, and it was built on top of centuries of being correctly suspicious of outsiders.

This is the part that matters for us. Sustained predation by an external power produces contracted trust as a survival mechanism. The contracted trust then produces an institutional landscape that looks fragmented, factional, and inward-facing - and that landscape is read, by outside observers and sometimes by the community itself, as a cultural failure. The reading is wrong. The behaviour is rational. Changing it requires changing the conditions, not lecturing the community.

What This Looks Like for Hazaras Specifically

The Hazara case fits the pattern in unusually clean form, because the persecution has been long, sustained, well-documented, and has come in waves that each tightened the trust radius further.

The Abdur Rahman campaigns of the 1890s. This is the foundational trauma in the modern Hazara story, and it did exactly what the literature would predict. The Amir's forces killed a large fraction of the Hazara population, took others into slavery, and seized the lands of Hazara families across central Afghanistan. The campaigns were specifically designed to break Hazara collective capacity. Indigenous leadership structures - the mirs and khans of particular valleys - were dismantled or co-opted. The administrative pattern that replaced them was deliberately fragmented: each district was dealt with separately, no district was allowed to develop a leader who could speak for more than its own valley, and the relationships between districts were systematically discouraged. This was state policy, not accident. Niamatullah Ibrahimi's work on the Hazaras and the Afghan state lays out the specifics. The result was a population whose first lesson, communicated through the deaths and dispossessions of an entire generation, was that the only safe trust was very, very local.

The twentieth century of administrative pressure. What followed was not always violent in the same way, but it was structurally consistent. Successive Afghan governments treated Hazaras as second-class citizens, allocated infrastructure and services unevenly, recognised local notables on terms designed to keep them dependent on Kabul, and continued the practice of preventing any single Hazara figure from becoming a credible national voice. By mid-century, Hazara communities had developed sophisticated internal organisation along district and sub-group lines, because that was the level at which organisation was possible. Cross-district institutions struggled to form because the state actively prevented them from forming, and because the trust to fund them did not exist outside the verified networks of valley and clan.

The 1990s and Hizb-e-Wahdat. When a unifying political vehicle did finally emerge under Iranian sponsorship, it carried inside it the whole accumulated weight of the contracted trust radius. The party held together for a brief period under intense external pressure - the Soviet withdrawal, the civil war, the rising threat from the Taliban - and then fractured along exactly the lines you would predict. Khalili. Mohaqiq. Akbari. Each anchored in a particular regional base, each backed by particular external sponsors, each commanding the trust of the networks that had always commanded trust in the community. The fragmentation of Hizb-e-Wahdat was not a failure of any individual leader. It was the predictable shape of any large institution attempting to operate on a trust radius narrower than the institution itself required.

The Taliban era and the post-2021 collapse. The first Taliban period, the relatively safer years after 2001, and the catastrophic return of Taliban control in 2021 each pushed in their own way. Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. Yakaolang in 2001. The Hazara students killed in Kabul in 2022 and 2023. Each event reinforced the underlying lesson that the only reliable trust is the trust you can verify yourself, and the only reliable network is the one that already protected you. The post-2021 collapse, in particular, sent a generation of Hazaras out of Afghanistan in conditions of extreme stress, with the people they could rely on reduced to whoever happened to be physically near them and whoever was reachable through the networks they already had. Those networks were almost always sub-group networks, because that is what survived intact through the years that produced them.

The consequence, observable in any Hazara community in Sydney, Toronto, San Diego, Quetta, or Hamburg, is the pattern I, Hadi, described in the source piece for this article: a thousand small, careful, defensive units, each one rationally minimizing risk by trusting only its own.

The Parallel Cases, Briefly

The point of looking at parallel cases is not to flatten the Hazara experience or to suggest it is interchangeable with anyone else's. The persecutions are not the same. The political contexts are not the same. The point is more limited and more useful: the pattern is real, it has been documented in many other peoples under comparable pressure, and the Hazara version is therefore not evidence of some specific Hazara cultural deficit.

Armenians after 1915. The Armenian community after the genocide built powerful institutions abroad, but the long internal divisions between Armenian communities in different host countries, between different church jurisdictions, between Hunchak and Dashnak political traditions, are well-documented. Sustained persecution and forced displacement produced exactly the contracted-trust pattern and the institutions that emerged tracked the pre-existing networks of who had survived alongside whom.

Sicilians and the long shadow of foreign rule. Gambetta's account of Sicily, already cited, is the cleanest theoretical case. Centuries of being governed by powers whose interests ran against the local population produced a society in which trust contracted to family and verified networks, and in which the institutional landscape that resulted was read by northerners and outsiders as a cultural pathology. It was not. It was an adaptation. The fact that it has been hard to undo is not because Sicilians are unusually resistant to civic life. It is because trust radius is built over generations and cannot be talked into expanding.

Northern Irish Catholics during and after the Troubles. A community under sustained pressure from a state apparatus that was not protecting it developed dense internal networks, parallel institutions, and a deep suspicion of the wider political order. The lines inside the community - between republican and constitutional nationalist traditions, between different parishes and neighborhoods, between those who left and those who stayed - were not erased by shared threat. The cooperation that did emerge took decades and required, among other things, the partial removal of the threat itself.

The pattern repeats because the mechanism is the same. People do not extend trust at the moment they are most justified in withholding it. Communities do not build wide institutions while the conditions that destroyed their last attempt at one are still in force.

Why This Reframe Matters

The most important thing this analysis does is move the explanation from character to circumstance. The fragmentation we observe in Hazara organisational life is not evidence that Hazaras lack solidarity or generosity or civic capacity. It is evidence that we are doing what every comparably situated people has done. The behaviour is rational. The conditions producing it are external. Holding that frame in mind changes a number of things in practice.

It changes how we talk about each other. It is common, in Hazara conversation, to hear the fragmentation described as a kind of inherited weakness - that we are too proud, too parochial, too quick to mistrust our own. That framing is not only inaccurate. It is corrosive. It internalises the explanation the persecutors would have offered and turns it on the survivors. A community that believes itself to be culturally fragmented behaves differently from a community that understands itself to be structurally adapted to the conditions it has lived in. The first is paralyzed. The second can change conditions.

It changes how we evaluate previous attempts at unity. The fracturing of Hizb-e-Wahdat was not a failure of the people inside it. It was a structure attempting to operate at a trust radius the community did not yet have. The lesson is not that the people involved were unserious. It is that the architecture was wrong for the soil. The next attempts have to be designed for the trust radius we actually have, with the explicit goal of slowly, deliberately expanding it. That is what the companion piece on this site is about.

It changes what we expect from the work of unity. If unity is something a charismatic leader produces by force of personality, the contracted trust radius dooms every attempt. If unity is something a community grows into, slowly, through repeated small experiences of cross-sub-group cooperation that go well, then the path is long but it is real. Each shared scholarship fund whose board includes Behsudi and Jaghori members and whose decisions are accepted by both. Each cultural archive governed by people from across the regions and used by everyone. Each annual gathering whose participants leave knowing the names and characters of people from valleys they had never previously cared about. These are trust-radius-expanding events. They are how a community moves, over generations, from bonding to bridging.

It changes how we hold the people abroad who have been part of this story. Hazara families in Toronto, Mississauga, San Diego, Denver, Sydney, Melbourne, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and London are not failing some test of community when they find themselves giving primarily to organizations rooted in the regions they came from. They are doing what trust does under the conditions their parents and grandparents lived under. The work of building wider trust is real work. It does not happen by being told, in a speech, that we should all just unite.

The Honest Closing

There is a temptation, when writing a piece like this, to end with reassurance. It will get better. The next generation will heal. We are stronger than the conditions made us.

The honest closing is more cautious. The contracted trust radius produced by a hundred and thirty years of sustained persecution does not heal in a generation. It does not heal automatically when the threat partially recedes. It heals slowly, unevenly, and only under conditions that are themselves still being built. The threat to Hazaras has not ended. The Taliban government in Kabul today is, in its actual policies, a continuation of the long Afghan state pattern of treating us as a population to be managed and contained, not a people to be governed alongside. The conditions for trust radius to expand inside Afghanistan are not yet in place. The conditions among Hazara communities outside Afghanistan are better but those communities are themselves shaped by the patterns they brought with them.

What we can do, knowing this, is two things.

First, we can stop describing our fragmentation as a moral failure. It is not. It is the correct adaptation to a sustained external campaign. Calling it what it is removes a layer of shame that has done nothing for us and replaces it with a layer of analysis we can actually work with.

Second, we can do the slow work of bridging on small, defensible scales, in conditions where the work has a chance of succeeding. Cross-sub-group institutions whose stakes are real but bounded. Friendships that cross the lines. Marriages that cross the lines. Funding decisions that cross the lines. Annual gatherings that cross the lines. Each one is a small contribution to a trust radius that will eventually be wide enough to support the institutions our community needs.

Neither of those things is fast. Neither produces a unified Hazara people inside a single funding cycle. Both, done patiently over decades, are how every other comparably situated people has slowly come back from what was done to them. There is no reason it cannot also be ours.

Sources consulted: Vamik Volkan, "Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism" (1997) and "Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts" (2006); Judith Herman, "Trauma and Recovery" (1992); Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" (2000) and "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century" (2007); Diego Gambetta, "The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection" (1993) and "Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations" (ed., 1988); Edward Banfield, "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society" (1958), read against its later critics; Niamatullah Ibrahimi, "The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition" (2017); Sayed Askar Mousavi, "The Hazaras of Afghanistan" (1998); Alessandro Monsutti, "War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan" (2005); Francis Fukuyama, "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" (1995) on radius of trust; literature on post-conflict trust recovery in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland; Minority Rights Group International country profiles on the Hazara.