Description
This paper focuses on the past two decades of non-Western (Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Arab Gulf) involvement in state-building in Afghanistan bilaterally and through the UN mission (UNAMA), including twenty UN programs and bodies in the country. Particularly, the paper explores correlations in non-Western governments’ reconstruction, stabilization, development, and public sector support practices with migration and trade restrictions placed around Afghan populations, goods, and services. Noting remarkable similarities in how Afghanistan and its people are represented and treated by Western and non-Western governments alike, I argue that the management of postcolonial spaces such as Afghanistan (i.e. those labeled “failed” or “fragile” states or “conflict zones”) aligns external governance interventions across a range of diverse actors. Thereby, where or who they are (Northern or Southern, Western or non-Western, liberal or illiberal) becomes immaterial for ordinary Afghans as external governance strategies ultimately converge around a nebulous public good of "global" or "regional stability". Governments with historically divergent, even conflicted, foreign policy discourses and geopolitical attitudes toward Afghanistan have supported a common set of interventions into the Afghan postcolony over the past two decades. Their effects have amounted to a geopolitical and population containment of Afghanistan aided by global governance institutions.
