Description
Why did the two-decade-long peacebuilding project in Afghanistan ultimately fail? Existing scholarship has shown that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and during the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the exclusion of defeated actors such as the Taliban, alongside the selective inclusion of others such as warlords and certain diaspora groups, critically undermined the legitimacy and inclusiveness of the Afghan state. Yet why did this strategic error occur—and why was it not corrected despite mounting evidence of its consequences? To address this question, this paper introduces the concept of stigma, originally developed in sociology and recently adapted in International Relations (IR) studies, to analyze the international community’s treatment of the Taliban. Stigma is understood here as a form of productive power embedded within the liberal world order, functioning to preserve the moral and normative coherence of international society. We argue that the stigmatization of the Taliban after 9/11 created a powerful disincentive for other political actors to engage with them. Fearing stigma transfer—that is, being labeled as “accomplices” of a terrorist organization—both domestic and international actors systematically excluded the Taliban from postwar peacebuilding. Such exclusion, however, produced a dilemma between maintaining international legitimacy and building domestic legitimacy. By tracing how stigmatization shaped the interaction between global liberal ordering and local peacebuilding practices, this paper explains why Afghanistan’s post-2001 political order remained fragile and unsustainable. The study contributes to debates on peacebuilding in the Global South and the liberal world order, while also extending the application of stigma theory to the study of non-state actors in international politics.
