Democracy Promotion, Local Participation, and Transnational Governmentality in Afghanistan

Abstract

Afghanistan—a country evoking images of poverty and mass migration, violence, and religious extremism to a Western audience—may seem a strange place to study the effects of democracy promotion. Yet Afghanistan is the destination of thousands of experts who conceive their endeavor within the framework of a struggle between the values of modernity (democracy, human rights, women’s empowerment, secular education, accountability, to mention but a few), the archaisms of tradition, and the corruption of the state system. Such an international involvement may recall to mind the presence of the Soviets in the 1980s who, in addition to their harsh military occupation, also implemented a development policy consisting of female emancipation, literacy campaigns, and land reform. But, more generally, Afghan history has been shaped recurrently by external actors. Building on the polity that the Pashtun tribes had created during their military advances of the mid-eighteenth century, modern Afghanistan came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century through the action of colonial powers. It is only at that time that the very name of the country was established, when the Russians and the British fixed its frontiers, making it a buffer state between their respective possessions in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.¹

* This chapter is based on a field research funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche, France. I am grateful to the Program in Agrarian Studies, at Yale University, where I had the opportunity to develop and present my work during the academic year 2008–2009. I am in debt to the people who have provided intellectual support and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper (in strict alphabetical order): Susanna Fioratta, Yan Greub, Shah M. Hanifi, Karen Hébert, Kay Mansfield, Keely Maxwell, Boris-Mathieu Petric, Laura Sayre, James Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Nandini Sundar, Arundhati Virmani. An expanded version of this text has been first published in Comparative Studies in Society and History 54(3), July 2012.