Home / Books / Decolonizing Afghanistan

Decolonizing Afghanistan

Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power

Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 376

Illustrations: 33 illustrations

Published: October 2025

Editors: Wazhmah Osman, Robert D. Crews

Contributors: Zohra Saed, Helena Zeweri, Nivi Manchanda, Morwari Zafar, Matthieu Aikins, Ali Karimi, Marya Hannun, Hosai Qasmi, Purnima Bose, Dawood Azami, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Gazelle Samizay, Paula Chakravartty

Subjects
Postcolonial and Colonial Studies, Asian Studies > South Asia, Cultural Studies > Surveillance Studies

As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. Featuring new and often sidelined ground-up perspectives, this collection examines how Afghan communities have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. Contributors interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power to analyze how narratives about Afghanistan have framed and legitimated imperial governance. Topics span the contradictions and consequences of the US “Forever” War, the rise of private security contracting, the deployment of biometric and surveillance technologies, the politics of US and Taliban countermedia operations, the evolution of gender discourses, and the mobilization of Afghan Americans and “Afghan culture,” among others. Throughout, contributors draw important connections and insights to ongoing global anticolonial struggles and offer paths to decolonial futures.

Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri

Praise

“Groundbreaking, refreshing, eloquent, and powerful, Decolonizing Afghanistan makes a crucial intervention into the knowledge produced on Afghanistan in the United States and more broadly. It provides nuance, depth, and original perspectives in its analysis of Afghanistan’s social, political, economic, and intellectual histories, and in its unique approach of decoloniality. Thanks to its wide scope and analytical richness, it represents a turning point in the dominant understanding of Afghanistan.” - Zahra Ali, author of Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation

“Employing dynamic decolonial approaches, this pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume does the crucial work of putting Afghanistan in the context of colonialism studies. Richly textured and brimming with historical context, it is the volume we need to teach about overlapping colonial formations, how diasporic and local political contestations can occur in tandem, and the vitality of Afghan cultural production. Including Afghanistan in colonialism studies, as this book implores us to do, is a must for our time.” - Amahl Bishara, author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression

"... Decolonizing Afghanistan makes a valuable contribution by re-centering Afghanistan within broader debates on empire, knowledge and power. It challenges scholars of Asian studies, international relations and development to interrogate the epistemological assumptions underpinning their work. The volume will be of particular interest to researchers and graduate students engaged in decolonial approaches, critical security studies and the politics of intervention, and it represents an important step toward rethinking Afghanistan beyond imperial epistemic frames." - Zulfia Abawe, International Quarterly of Asian Studies

Buy

Paper

Hardcover

Availability: In stock

Price: $29.95

Buy the e-book:

Apple Books

Open Access

Read the OA edition here

Request a desk or exam copy

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Wazhmah Osman is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Temple University.

Robert D. Crews is Professor of History at Stanford University.

Introduction. Decolonizing Afghanistan: A Turning Point / Wazhmah Osman, Helena Zeweri, and Robert D. Crews 1
Part 1. Imperial Imaginaries and the Historical Production of Afghanistan as a Diagnostic Object of Global Security
1. Imperial Misconceptions: The Politics of Knowledge Production / Nivi Manchanda 35
2. Afghanistan and the Soviet Colonial Archive / Robert D. Crews 54
3. The Imperial Gaze and the Development Gaze: Reckoning with the Two Faces of American Empire and Its Afterlives and Deaths / Wazhmah Osman 72
Part 2. Infrastructures and Technologies of Empire
4. Operationalizing "Afghan Culture": Role-Playing and Translation in US Military Counterinsurgency Training / Morwari Zafar 97
5. Shifting Loyalties and Profits: The Rise of Afghanistan's Western-Funded Private Security Contractors / Matthieu Aikins 115
6. Tracking and Targeting: The US Surveillance Infrastructures in Afghanistan / Ali Karimi 134
Part 3. The Politics and Optics of Representation: Media and Propaganda
7. Modernity and Gender Beyond the European Gaze: International Media Coverage of Afghanistan and the Making of News in the 1920s—King Amanullah and Queen Suraya's Grand Tour / Marya Hannun 153
8. A Changing Orientalist Representation of Afghans and Afghanistan in Indian Cinema / Hosai Qasmi 174
9. Withdrawal Narratives: Afghan Women, Time, and Developmental Idealism / Purnima Bose 194
10. The Second Front: The Taliban Information Operation and the Battle for Hearts and Minds in the US/NATO War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) / Dawood Azami 218
Part 4. Reflecting and Speaking Back to Empire
11. Between Humanitarian Aid and Political Critique: Afghan American Mobilizations Post-Evacuation / Helena Zeweri 247
12. Reflections: Afghan Literature and Politics Under US Occupation / Sabauon Nasseri 267
13. Imperial Remainders: Reconfiguring the Legacy of US Occupation in Contemporary Afghan Art / Tausif Noor 284
14. Disrupting the Colonial Canvas: Afghan Art in the Wake of Withdrawal / Gazelle Simizay 295
15. An Other Afghanistan: Indigeneity, Migration, and Belonging in Andkhoy (1973) / Zohra Saed 317
Coda / Paula Chakravartty 335
Acknowledgments 343
Contributors 345
Index 351

Rights

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing