At the intersection of multipolar, multi-scalar sites of mutual exchange and tension, Afghanistan and Iraq conjure imaginaries of shadowy and risky geographies wired up to dispersed terrorist cells around the globe. These spaces constitute the sites where the “civilizing process” of the “War on Terror” takes place, “laboratories of globalization” where global hegemonic neoliberal projects of free market democratization and development get stranded.Footnote 1 At the same time, they are spaces where global interconnections are accelerated, and where multiple mobilities, often contingent upon expectations about the successes and failures of reconstruction, are interwoven, producing networks that extend well beyond national borders.
I initially intended to focus this essay on the less tangible flow of values, concepts, ideas, and know-how that accompany the circulation of people, commodities, and organizations that populate the landscapes of the “War on Terror.” But the events that have been unfolding over the past year—the withdrawal of NATO and US forces from Afghanistan and what followed—led me instead to reflect on the deeply entrenched inequities in experiences of mobility, on the one hand, and their implications for research and researchers on the other. The inequities in patterns of mobility in and around Afghanistan are neither a new phenomenon, nor specific to Afghanistan. But in many ways, the so-called evacuation that took place in the second half of August 2021 further underlined the deep inequalities and inequities that characterized Afghanistan in the “reconstruction era.”Footnote 2 It brought to light the sheer absurdity of policies circumscribing the movement of persons.
In what follows, I wish to raise three sets of questions. The first relates to the cluster event of the withdrawal-evacuation-resettlement in August 2021 and what it reveals about operations of power and institutionalized forms of violence. The second interrogates our engagement, as researchers, with the time and space nexus. Beyond events and the crude light they shed, at a given point in time, on mechanisms through which power is produced and sustained, how do we put them into perspective to avoid analyses that are either (or both) too general and too reductive? Are we not missing something if we focus on a supposed “specificity” of countries affected by the “War on Terror” in particular and by conflict in general? Finally, I wish to interrogate our ethical positioning, as researchers, vis-à-vis a terrain in which we are deeply enmeshed.
Mobility, Violence, and Vulnerability
For the global audience, the mediatization of the withdrawal in August 2021 suddenly unveiled the unequal power relations, restraining border regimes, and violence subsumed in interactions between stakeholders in the failed “reconstruction project” of Afghanistan.Footnote 3 At the same time, it obscured the fact that Afghan citizens had long been looking for (and often finding) opportunities to move beyond the borders of the state—opportunities that had grown increasingly restricted by the very governments that suddenly scrambled to evacuate “vulnerable persons” in August and early September 2021.Footnote 4
Suddenly hauled into a haphazard evacuation, neoliberal governments sought to do what they know best: create criteria to define who was most in need of immediate protection. Decisions on whom to evacuate and in what order reflected institutionalized forms of violence in the valuing of bodies: diplomats and expatriates first, followed by persons with whom the former had interacted, and a vague range of categories of those deemed in danger.Footnote 5 These categories and the ways in which they were operationalized seemed to be less informed by the danger and threats that persons were facing than by a messy mix of ideological assumptions, networks of relationships, and loosely defined (often absurd) categories of entitlement.Footnote 6 Quickly faced by the inapplicability of their own criteria, Western governments turned to the alternative of reaching target numbers.
Beyond the blatant fallacy of the rhetoric of saviorism deployed by Western states and the frivolity of attempts by stakeholders of various sorts to assist in evacuating “those in need” (and I include myself in the latter group) was the brutal physical and psychological violence faced by those willing (or not) to leave. In addition to the cruelty of being categorized as either worthy or not of evacuation, they had to contend with the pressures by members of closer or broader networks to be included on the right “lists,” the arbitrariness of the selection process that ensued, the trauma of making one's way to Kabul airport, the harshness in being resettled in supposedly safe places around the globe (military camps, asylum treatment centers, triage areas, etc.), where many were still stranded at the time of this writing, over six months after their evacuation from Afghanistan.
In very schematic terms, and recognizing these inequalities and the violence subsumed within them, how do we move beyond an inadequate framing that portrays Afghans as victimized bodies subjected to the violence of neoliberal powers that attempt to “order” the movement of people? How do we avoid the othering of those who live and move within and around spaces of deconstruction and reconstruction that are characteristic of the “War on Terror” and its social engineering components?
Judith Butler's reconceptualization of vulnerability as embedded in social relations and action can provide a useful way forward.Footnote 7 Butler cautions against framing vulnerability as a passive category of intervention for humanitarians and states, arguing instead that we should attend to the political, social, and historical conditions under which vulnerability is produced and managed. Doing so opens up space for critical reflection, not only on the structures that produce “vulnerability,” or our own engagement and interference, but also on the relationship between vulnerability and resistance. Citing migrants in Europe who drew on their specific situation to actively organize against the states detaining them, Butler argues resistance can operate as “a resource of vulnerability.”Footnote 8 Applying this framework to the cluster event of the withdrawal-evacuation-resettlement might prompt us to consider the ways in which those who were being categorized, enlisted or excluded from lists, resettled or left behind, have resisted and denounced the very processes to which they were subjected; how the ineptness and arbitrariness of supposedly planned policies of Western actors was exposed in this process; and how the emerging Taliban regime itself manipulates categories of vulnerability to enforce a new, competing regime of violence and inequality.
There will be a need to critically examine the ways in which states maneuver to uphold the vulnerability of some Afghans in need of protection as a tool to assert the superiority of the values they promote against those of the new Taliban regime, while at the same time advertising their own vulnerability to those labeled as migrants, or terrorists, to justify the deployment of a range of techniques to exclude or distance others. Of how gendered bodies (their movement, the extent to which they are identified as vulnerable and to what) remain at the center of ideological struggles. But focusing on the facts constitutive of the event of the withdrawal (evacuation-resettlement) also obliterates a longer-term perspective to account for the ways in which violence emerges and vulnerability is produced, reproduced, and distributed, over time and across space. This leads to my second question: when studying social processes in places heavily affected by the violence of circumstances, how do we move beyond the analysis of facts constitutive of an event?
Beyond the Event: Engaging with Time and Space
Events take place in a specific space-time. They are the products of circumstances, defined by facts around which acts, emotions, and discourses coalesce at a given point in time, built around expectations of a change to come.Footnote 9 In this sense, the moments and facts that constitute events provide a rich terrain on which to build analyses. But events also operate against the backdrop of discourses and paradigmatic frameworks that have sedimented over time, the genealogies of which need to be retraced. Perhaps this is where social scientists might benefit from engaging with historians. Indeed, as James Caron, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, and Abhilash Medhi all illustrate to varying degrees with their contributions to this roundtable, events are the product of interconnections that exceed a single (spatial, temporal) scale of analysis. To make sense of them, we need to adopt approaches that are historicized and relational, take into account the circumstances and the longer-term, historical context within which events are embedded, the patterns of interaction that produce them.
I have talked of the withdrawal from Afghanistan as an event. At a slightly broader scale, the “War on Terror” itself can be defined as an event. As such, we can ask: what do the historical and contextual continuities and discontinuities between the two contexts (Iraq and Afghanistan) reveal about the contemporary implications of the “War on Terror” within each space? About the frameworks of power it produces? And, to link my questions to the thematic focus of mobilities: what do they tell us about the circulation of ideas, concepts, and know-hows and the ways in which they are interpreted, supported, and contested by different actors?
Taking into account both the historical depth of events and the multiple interactions and fault lines that constitute them across space and time also has the benefit of demystifying them. Rather than a looming glass orienting the content of our analyses, the “War on Terror,” taken as an event, can be analyzed and deconstructed. In doing so, we move beyond it and prevent it from overdetermining our analyses.
What is the relevance of “War on Terror,” then, in framing our analyses? There is a truth to the fact that, as social scientists, we cannot avoid the impact on the lives of persons of what has been termed the “War on Terror.” Conflict and the social engineering deployed in “reconstruction” and state-building agendas are constitutive of the everyday experiences of our interlocutors. But at the same time, the patterns of inequality and the violence of processes associated with Western-led interventions—military, development, and humanitarian alike—are by no means specific to Afghanistan. I would further argue that they extend beyond places affected by conflict. Indeed, geographies of development across the globe are characterized by similar dynamics.Footnote 10
I believe it is possible to build synergies beyond analytical frames of war and conflict, or perhaps to initiate a reflection around how conflict, as a contingent reality, interacts (or not) with other contemporary phenomena, more latent paradigmatic representations, and practices. What would emerge, for instance, by connecting, comparing, and contrasting social dynamics in neighboring Iran, Central Asia, South Asia, and further afield? If we recognize and disentangle the networks of connections and interconnections that link spaces, what would we learn about whether and how these spaces are shaped and transformed over time through exchanges, networks of interaction, and transfers?
In urban centers of the reconstruction era, for instance, it was not uncommon to hear that Afghans who had grown up in Iran and come to Afghanistan after 2001 had “brought” with them values, attitudes, and practices that were aloof to an imagined “Afghan culture,” feeding into stereotypical representations of the enemy within. For example, in my fieldwork, marital ceremonies and transactions in urban Afghanistan were, not unlike in previous decades, a bone of contention and at the center of preoccupations over national identity. Differences in marriage practices among Afghan migrants coming from Iran were sometimes portrayed by their neighbors as the embodiment of different value systems, crystallizing tensions, particularly as they pertained to gender arrangements and Islam. But although Afghan migrants in Iran were exposed to marital ceremonies and transactions different from those which their parents had practiced prior to emigration, these practices underwent processes of selection and adaptation as migrants returned to Afghanistan.Footnote 11 Furthermore, they reflected the constant shifts that marital ceremonies and transactions undergo in urban Afghanistan, becoming, in and of themselves, part of contemporary debates over identity and culture.Footnote 12 This example speaks to how values, attitudes, and practices are not simply imported, or transposed from one cultural space to another: they are adapted as the actors who carry them interact with new networks, references, or institutions. They shape the urban space, cultural formations, and representations as much as they are shaped by them.Footnote 13
An analysis that pays attention to mobilities and integrates a reflection on time and space allows us to debunk tropes and essentializing representations of Afghanistan that continue to permeate the media landscape: those of a “tribal” society, gripped in immovable “traditions” that victimize undifferentiated “Afghan women,” exotic visions of the “land of the unconquerable” or the “graveyard of empires” imbued with imperialist representations.Footnote 14
What about Us?
Beyond the ethical considerations of conducting research “in conflict settings,” the wide-reaching implications of the “War on Terror” both ideologically and practically raise the question of knowledge production, and how those of us who produce knowledge engage with research participants and interlocutors in the field. As researchers, we are actors in the inequitable relations that characterize mobilities and flows of people, material, and immaterial objects in and around Afghanistan. Those of us who are not Afghan, in particular, have benefited from privileged passport regimes, a relative flexibility in determining the duration of our stay, where we stay, how we engage with the field, and when and how we feel secure or insecure. This flexibility does not preclude, however, the rigidly unequal position within which we are located, and the fact that, nolens volens, we often reproduce the very structures of power we intend to denounce. They span the type of access we have to sources, the narratives we provide, how we write, and who we write for.
Part of this endeavor will be to acknowledge, as Romain Malejacq and Dipali Mukhopadhyay have argued, that our research is an intervention, just as military operations, development, and humanitarian aid are.Footnote 15 In particular, it is worth thinking about the neoliberal trend that affects all these interventions with a similar obsession with quantifiable, measurable performance, whether in terms of outputs and results (for development and humanitarian interventions), or publications, ranking, and media presence (for academic research): performance first and foremost aimed at Western audiences.
Recognizing this participation in asymmetrical power relations and rethinking our own involvement within frameworks of domination produced by geographies of war and development is the first step. Yet more is needed. I argue that focusing on methods and “ethical research designs” is necessary but insufficient, as is merely discussing our positionality (again: necessary, even essential, but not enough).
What is to be done once we have recognized that we are never passive observers but actors of structures of domination? Drawing on Butler, how do we move beyond an ethical positioning that is negative and individual toward one that is affirmative and plural? How do we participate in a public discourse that resonates with the lives of the people with whom we engage? After the blatant failure of the intervention in Afghanistan, there is a certain facility (even opportunism) in remaining in the negative position of denouncing the neoliberal intervention and its wide-reaching social, political, and economic consequences. The question of how to move beyond a denunciatory position remains unanswered for me to date, but I strongly believe it should be at the heart of our ongoing reflections on research.
