Rendering Afghanistan legible: Borders, frontiers and the ‘state’ of Afghanistan
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395717716013 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717716013
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(4) 386 –401
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395717716013
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Rendering Afghanistan legible:
Borders, frontiers and the
‘state’ of Afghanistan
Nivi Manchanda
The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
The aim of this article is to show how the partial colonisation of Afghanistan and its ‘frontier
status’ have generated discourses of state failure, which have led to the construal of Afghanistan
as a zone of exception and of permanent crisis. The main argument is that colonial spatialisations
have an enduring legacy that continues to structure the ways in which we experience and think
about the Afghan state today. The construction of Afghanistan today as a ‘failed state’ has emerged
through a historical (Anglophone) discourse that has relied heavily on the trope of the ‘frontier’ to
make sense of the place between India and Central Asia. Thus, the ‘frontier’ has played a formative
role in defining Afghanistan as a state and space and this plays out in how we interact – through
representation, policies, and intervention – with the state in the global realm today. The import of
this extends far and wide and has ramifications for our understanding of coloniality and liminality
in contemporary international relations (IR), including scholarship on sovereignty statehood, and
borders. It also has implications for a range of states and places that are considered ‘fragile’,
‘failing’, or ‘failed’.
Keywords
Afghanistan, borders, empire, knowledge, state
Received: 30th January 2016; Revised version received: 8th February 2017; Accepted: 16th March 2017
Introduction
In the present world order, characterised by crises and interventions, how has Afghanistan
come to be construed not only as the place ‘where empires come to die’ but also where
‘exceptionally bad things happen’? How has it become so closely associated with the
notion of state collapse? These questions have a significance that extends much beyond
Corresponding author:
Nivi Manchanda, Department of International Relations, The London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: n.manchanda1@lse.ac.uk
716013POL0010.1177/0263395717716013PoliticsManchanda
research-article2017
Special Section Article
Manchanda 387
Afghanistan. The aim of this article is to show how the partial colonisation of Afghanistan
and its ‘frontier status’ have generated discourses of state failure, which have led to the
construal of Afghanistan as a zone of exception and of permanent crisis.
My main argument is that colonial spatialisations have an enduring legacy that contin-
ues to structure the ways in which we experience and think about the Afghan state today.
The state in Afghanistan did not fully materialise as a ‘principle for reading reality’ or
‘scheme for intelligibility’; it was never completely exposed to the application of govern-
mental reason that occurred in Europe and – to a lesser degree – in parts of the ‘properly’
colonised world. In keeping with the themes of this Special Section, I foreground the
claim that exclusionary understandings of Afghanistan must be comprehended as violent
and racialised. In turn, ‘crises’, ‘invasions’, and ‘interventions’ are not hermetically or
temporally sealed ‘events’ but are instead produced as such in dominant international
relations (IR) narratives, in order to explain didactically, to provide short-term solutions,
and to gloss over the messy complexities that arise out of an enduring imperial power/
knowledge nexus. The crux of this article is that the construction of Afghanistan today as
a ‘failed state’ has emerged through a historical (Anglophone) discourse that has relied
heavily on the trope of the ‘frontier’ to make sense of the place between India and Central
Asia. Thus, the ‘frontier’ has played a formative role in defining Afghanistan as a state
and space and this plays out in how we interact – through representation, policies, and
intervention – with the state in the global realm today. The import of this extends far and
wide and has ramifications for our understanding of coloniality and liminality in contem-
porary IR, including scholarship on sovereignty statehood and borders. It also has impli-
cations for a range of states and places that are considered ‘fragile’, ‘failing’, or ‘failed’.
Starting from the premise that empires are ‘scaled genres of rule’ (Stoler, 2006) that
produce and rely upon differing degrees of sovereignty in their spheres of influence,
Afghanistan emerges as a particular imperial formation, but not quite a unique one. The
labels applied to the Afghan state – ‘buffer’, ‘rogue’, or ‘failed’ – are essential elements
in a story of imperial sense-making. And yet, Afghanistan’s long lineage of constructed
deviance confounds established narratives of colonisation and equally elides the state
failure literature because they both under-appreciate peripheries, frontiers, and zones of
exceptions. After situating Afghanistan in the wider critical IR literature on the state, the
discussion traces the genealogy and cartographic lineage of ‘Afghanistan’ from its appear-
ance ‘on the map’ to the current delineation of its borders, including the idea of ‘Af-Pak’
that has gained traction in both policy and academic milieus.
Afghanistan and sovereign ‘failure’
Afghanistan is, for all practical purposes, considered a ‘failed state’. The zealous state-
building projects undertaken after the intervention in 2001, many abandoned in the face
of high costs, disillusionment, and a wavering commitment to, and often half-baked con-
ception of, ‘nation-building’ are all irrevocably mired in a vocabulary of state fragility,
failure, collapse, and corruption as almost inherent and a priori conditions of Afghanistan
as a political (and territorial) entity. Stanizai (2014) strikes a chord with many when he
asks whether we can ‘afford another failed state in Afghanistan’ and cautions that its
‘fragile political structure, presently held together by a scaffolding of American military
and economic assistance, could collapse into a failed state overnight’.
The danger of Afghanistan returning to its ‘failed’ status quo – as under the Taliban –
has animated, and continues to ignite, the concerns of leaders in the Western world. In
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