Workshop Abstracts
Panel 1 – Archives and oral history
Taraki, Tillya Tepe, Taliban: Bactrian Gold’s Afgantsy Past
Burzine Waghmar (SOAS, University of London)
Any centennial survey of Afghan independence in 2019 ought consider how a dislocated past and disjunctured present is ideationally harnessed to sustain a collective memory, foster a shared ‘common culture’ and exhort nation-building which, as Disraeli reminds, ‘is a work of art and a work of time’. Artistic achievement of nomadic, pre-Islamic, Afghan heritage is, therefore, the departure point of this examination: the spectacular discovery of six royal graves on November 15, 1978, seven months on from the 7 Saur revolution (April 27, 1978), containing almost 20,600 gold artefacts. Its post-9/11 vicissitudes almost three decades on, and ‘rediscovery’ thanks to the National Geographic Society, has disseminated universal appreciation of Afghan ‘culture’ through still ongoing travelling exhibitions since 2006. Foregrounding the purpose, production and pedigree of this Central Asian trove betraying Helleno-Irano-Indic inspirations and influences, this paper discusses its parti pris appropriation by Afghans of varying political predispositions. Artificially affirmed nostalgia for the ‘forgotten Kushans’ is deployed to elude ambivalence. But the past is a foreign country, as David Lowenthal (d. 2018) felicitously noted, in his namesake opus. Afghan attitudes remain mixed towards a frequently despoiled heritage in a conflict-ridden state uneasily inheriting a congeries of eclectic cultures.
Gendered Memories of War and Displacement: Discourses and Narratives in Life Histories of Afghan refugee men in Iran
Azadeh Sobout (University of Manchester)
The human element of the Afghanistan war has been absent from the mainstream media and Afghan refugees have not received much of the world’s attention. Accordingly, most images have portrayed Afghan men as the aggressors, while very few studies have targeted the particular impact of conflict and displacement on their lives and their exposure to gender-based violence.
This research acknowledges the diversity in the life experiences of men using gender as a starting point of analysis. It explores how Afghan men have experienced forced migration and how the experience have impacted on them physically, psychologically, economically, socially and culturally. Drawing a vivid picture of Afghan community in Iran using intense personal narratives, the research illuminates powerful interrogation of the complex relationships between gender, diaspora and identity, told through field observations and life stories of more than 50 men and young boys who belong to Afghanistan’s huge diaspora in Iran. Consequently, the research explores the challenges to masculine identity experienced by individual Afghan men and boys and the varied ways in which they try to reconstruct their identity within the harsh realities of their lives in displacement.
Panel 2 – Coloniality, independence, historiography
Military Orientalism and the Colonial Construction of the "Afghan"
Marcello Fantoni (University of Kent)
The popular and enduring narrative of Afghanistan's military history is that of individual, loosely organised militia units humbling empires and displaying an inexhaustible capacity to engage in guerrilla warfare. This narrative is both a historical and social construct. A historical construct in that it immortalises a form of warfare which only appeared in the mid 19th century; and a social construct in that the orientalised portrayal of resistance became romanticised by colonial authors and military officers, who in the protracted insurgencies of the North-West frontier sought to project an image of an enemy which, despite their efforts, was allusive and indefatigable. After repeated defeats in the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars and the endless skirmishes which accompanied the fixation of the Durand Line in 1893 the popularised notion of the "Afghan" was cemented in the imperialist zeitgeist. This notion of martiality is still in vogue today and has resulted in the propagation of the image of an insular homogenised identity and a culture of war. This paper seeks to deconstruct this lasting vestige of the colonial imagination and to see how the nexus of territoriality, history and conflict has created an image of society which is fundamentally at odds with reality.
Afghan Postage Stamps Commemorating Independence Day
Mateusz M. Kłagisz (Jagiellonian University)
In my contribution to the second SOAS conference on Afghan Studies – Afghanistan in the World: 100 Years of Independence – I am going to present postage stamps commemorating Independence Day that were printed over the last one hundred years. Being of a rather small size but with a wide circulation, the postage stamp uses specific symbols and/or slogans that are easy to understand by both the sender and the addressee. An assortment of symbols and/or slogans is somehow determined by the current political and ideological situation in a country. Hence, postage stamps are an interesting source of information regarding political life, and any changes in design should be analysed not only from an artistic point of view, but also can be understood as changes or shifts in the official political narrative. The same can be said about Afghan postage stamps, especially those that were dedicated to Independence Day. Even a cursory analysis allows us to determine the basic stock of symbols found in subsequent releases of postage stamps. Changes in the selection of symbols also allow us to trace changes in Afghan politics, including loosening political constraints in the 1960s, or attemptsto establish a socialist system in the 1980s. In my research I follow Barthesʼs methodology found in his article Rhetoric of the Image, and study all the stamps on three levels: (1) a linguistic message easily distinguishable from (2) a coded iconic one, and finally (3) a non-coded iconic message.
Nationalist historiography of the pre-Islamic period in Musahiban Afghanistan
Tariq Basharat (SOAS, University of London)
My research is centred on the works of Afghan Nationalist historians who specifically focused on the pre-Islamic past of the country during the Musahiban period (1930-78). With the help of subjects such as numismatics and archaeology, key historians such as Ahmad Ali Kohzad and their DAFA interlocutors revolutionised the field of History in Afghanistan by introducing innovative new methods which broadened the scope of historical inquiry beyond the traditional court chronicles that had been prevalent since the medieval period. Consequently, Afghanistan could etch out an identity that accommodated a deeper and richer past. The Musahiban government at this time were more than accommodating towards this strand of historiography because it complemented their nation-building endeavours. This was true because the study of pre-Islamic Afghanistan allowed an inclusive outlook on the nation's collective past. This was in stark contrast to the court chronicles that had thus far focused mostly on the exploits of the Pashtun royal family. Besides, prior historical inquiries into the country’s history was effectively capped at the 7th century forefather of the Pashtuns, Qais Abdul Rashid. The use of archaeology allowed Afghans to regain a remembrance of a past that had been forgotten, a past that included Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and pagan worship.
Panel 3 – State-building amidst conflict
Hundred Years of Afghan Economy
Shoaib Rahim (Afghanistan Affairs Unit)
The Third Anglo- Afghan war is referred to as War of Independence in Afghanistan because the country won independence in foreign affairs and recognition by the British as independent country. In August 2019, hundred years of this event would be completed. However, the country has witnessed continued instability, chaos and conflict since then, except for a small period of relative peace and prosperity. Unfortunately, the literature about the mentioned period predominantly covers the aspects of political instability and conflict while the discussions about economic history are largely sporadic. A landlocked Afghanistan has had a unique economic journey given the strategic location as a buffer state between British India and Russia during Great Game before becoming relevant in cold war between Russia and United States followed by civil war and the current post 9/11 era. The paper presents a chronological history and characteristics of Afghan economy under each head of state till date. As such, it provides an overview of trade, domestic production, key sectors particularly agriculture, reliance on external funding and major constraints to economic growth and development. Further, it analyzes the policies, plans and reforms. The paper relies on published papers, prominent books and official reports from credible sources like the digital library of Afghanistan Center Kabul University (ACKU) which has an extensive collection of academic works about Afghanistan. At the end, the paper presents key lessons Afghanistan needs to learn from its economic history.
Critiquing the formal–informal dichotomy in Afghan local governance
Wil Patrick (University of Victoria)
The role of non-state governance in a “modern” Afghan state has been a central point of contention in post-2001 discourse, especially within the context of sub-national governance at the local level. Scholars of local governance in Afghanistan frequently rely on the dichotomy of formal and informal to distinguish between state-sanctioned forms of governance and non-state practices. The application of this paradigm to Afghanistan perpetuates colonialism and imperialism through imposed critical standards that directly inhibits decolonization by being implicitly biased towards Western forms of governance and state-building. First, I interrogate the terminology of this dichotomy in the literature to illustrate how state-centric theorization privileges Western norms characterizing liberal democratic states. Second, I argue that qualities used to define informal governance—opaque, illegitimate, unofficial—are positioned from an outsider’s perspective and not indicative of local perceptions or practices. Finally, I illustrate how this paradigm has framed the direction of recent scholarship and assumes building towards norms of Western state governance is preferable. Critiquing state-centric dichotomies in local governance discourse reorients the questions scholars pose about governance in Afghanistan and their recommendations towards the decolonization of current political structures.
Statebuilding in Post-9/11 Afghanistan: The Façade of Liberal Peace and the Resurgence of the Hybrid State
Adam Alimi (York University)
Seventeen years in post 9/11 Afghanistan have not produced the desired statebuilding necessary by some observers to grant ultimate legitimacy to the Western-backed administration in Kabul. The Afghan state is hardly a modern, rational-legal, liberal ideal type originally envisioned by the United Nations and the United States in the Bonn Accords and subsequent nationbuilding process. Debates can fairly be made whether or not effective statebuilding was the main objective in Afghanistan to begin with. Noticeably, as the international community has scaled back its intervention, there has emerged a growing focus on the academic literature on statebuilding which has not been able to provide an accurate understanding of the statebuilding venture in Afghanistan. To that end, the conventional ‘liberal peace’ paradigm of statebuilding in 2001 has been replaced by statebuilding literatures that focus on the ‘hybrid’ trajectories of state formation in the Global South. How then should the Afghan state be understood after all: as a stable state, or a failed state, or somewhere in the stable-failed spectrum? And then perhaps the most important question is: what accounts for the changes in these paradigms of state building and failure? Put differently, how does one reconcile the academic shift from a departure point of a liberal state in post 9/11 Afghanistan, to a landing spot of a ‘hybrid state’ now in effect?
Taxation and State-Building
Sarajuddin Isar (SOAS, University of London)
This research focuses on the fiscal dimension of state-building in Afghanistan. It aims to examine the relationship between state-building and taxation in post Bonn Afghanistan comparing Karzai’s and Ghani’s administrations, but whilst also scrutinizing this relationship in relation to earlier periods of Afghan history. It aims to first explore how taxation was negotiated/decided in post Bonn era, second what factors have influenced these negotiations and finally what impacts they consequently had on the extractive capacity of the state. These negotiations and policies will be located within a wider historical perspective through a mapping of the historical emergence of the state-building and taxation, which dates back to the reign of Durrani’s in 1947.
For the purpose of this study, I have divided the state-building literature into historical and political economy approaches that describe and explain the long process of endogenous state formation, based upon the early European experience, and the more recent literature, on exogenous neoliberal state-building. These two bodies of literature lead to two different sets of conclusions about the links between taxation and state-building and these differences will be explored by looking at the Afghan case.