Description
This article introduces a framework that explains rupture and change in the modern world order by examining how postcolonial complexity unravels imperial power. Through a study of the Afghan-Soviet War (1979–1989), it demonstrates how the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became a generative terrain where resistance remade global order, decisively shaping the end of the Cold War. The analysis demonstrates that systemic change was driven not merely by great power rivalry and domestic politics in the West, but by the dialectical encounter between imperial projects and the postcolonial complexities they helped create. Leveraging U.S. and Gulf patronage, Pakistan's military-intelligence apparatus, together with the Mujahideen, entangled the USSR in a proxy war, revealing how peripheral actors constrain and redirect global power. The Soviet Union was exhausted while the U.S. later faced blowback from the very forces it cultivated, illustrating the recursive consequences of imperial intervention. By centring postcolonial actors and transboundary dynamics, this analysis challenges Eurocentric narratives, arguing that the international system is often remade from its margins. This has profound implications for understanding the links between the Cold War and decolonization, the role of borderlands in contemporary 'forever wars,' and the enduring agency of the Global South.
