A Critique of Knowledge Production About Afghanistan

By Munazza Ebtikar ( 17 February 2020)

When I pick up an ethnographic or historical work in English about Afghanistan, I find it difficult to not feel a sense of foreignness to the country and the people that this work presumes to understand and describe. The local literature, oral histories, memories, and lived experiences that have shaped and continue to shape my understanding of the country, its people, and by extension of myself, is absent in this work.

Anglophone authors describe an Afghanistan that is divorced from my reality; making me believe that their knowledge is rational, unbiased, and material, while my reality is partial, subjective, and immaterial.

The academic framework within which Anglophone scholars of Afghanistan work is still marked by a history of colonial scholarship to this day, even though European colonial empires no longer exist in their nineteenth-century form. Specific terms (such as ‘warlord’ or ‘tribe’), frameworks of understanding (such as Afghanistan being a tribal society), and traditional methodologies (such as solely relying on British, American, and Russian imperial archives to write about Afghan history) require us to understand Afghanistan within rigid knowledge structures.

As a consequence of the current US-led war in Afghanistan, the Anglophone work produced on Afghanistan directly influences the ways in which Washington perceives the country and its inhabitants. The power to represent and theorize about Afghanistan is located in the West, which has produced knowledge to establish economic, political, and cultural power over the region and its inhabitants. Thus, as objects of study, Afghans have become important for imperial projects. Edward Said maintains that:

“Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.”[i]

For an imperial power, according to Said, the ruler and the ruled become interdependent. Thus, ideas and frameworks of understanding are both established and developed with the ruled as the object of power.

When Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859), the first British East India Company envoy in the Kabul court came to visit the Afghan king Shah Shuja in Peshawar in February 1809, he wrote and published the seminal Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies.[ii]

This work provided extensive accounts of Afghanistan from his lens and has had a lasting impact in the knowledge and governance of both Afghanistan and colonial India, so much so that some common understandings of Afghanistan (such as the country being tribally organized) can be traced back to him.[iii] We therefore have ‘an entire intellectual edifice constructed upon one man’s (mammoth) study of the land, people, flora and fauna he encountered in the early 19th century.’[iv]

This is an illustration of the way in which imperial powers both create and maintain knowledge/power over the narrative about what Afghans are and what Afghanistan is. This knowledge/power becomes fixed, permanent, and objective truth in specific academic traditions and policy circles.

This makes one ask, what has been neglected in the study of Afghanistan, why has it been neglected, and how can we create other ways of knowing and being?

Some recent works by scholars of Afghanistan challenge us to look beyond the status quo. Nivi Manchanda, in her essay, contends that the omnipresent understanding of Afghanistan as having a tribally-based social organization and being deemed an exception or in permanent crisis (a ‘fragile’, ‘failing’, or ‘failed’ state), is based on the ways in which the administrators of the East India Company would make sense of the ‘Other’.[v]

Afghan social organizations are considered tribal as they are ‘alternately constructed as a security problem, a political threat and as something that needs “engaging with”’[vi]. Moreover, Manchanda deduces that the understanding of Afghanistan as a ‘failed state’ relies on the ‘frontier’ trope between British India and Central Asia, meaning that ‘its construal at various points as a buffer, or a failed state, or as a theatre of war, has meant that colonial power can intervene, bomb from a distance, nation-build, and leave, as it sees fit, with impunity’.[vii]

Similarly, Keith Stanski argues that the term ‘warlord’ is based on a colonial understanding of the violent Afghan ‘Other’.[viii] The term came into rampant use by the US policy-making machinery in post-2001 Afghanistan to refer to Afghan political/militia leaders who were active from the Soviet-Afghan war until today.

The term constantly shifts depending on the context; so-called warlords are favorable at times (when political/militia leaders overthrew the Taliban) and unfavorable in other contexts. Both Manchanda and Stanski infer that these misconceptions have provided legitimacy for intervention, invasion, and nation-building in Afghanistan, as in the colonial period.

To create other ways of knowing and being, students and scholars of Afghanistan must problematize and deconstruct common assumptions held about the country and its people. Analyses must interrogate top-down, Kabul-centric, male-centric, ethno-centric and western-centric claims.

Giving more meaning to, and being critical of, local sources, diverse perspectives, and relying on various and ‘nontraditional’ methodologies (e.g. oral histories) will help us to see Afghans on their own terms. This will allow us to locate Afghans among larger socio-political and socio-historical webs of significance.

(Munazza Ebtikar is a PhD Candidate in the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis lies between history and anthropology.)



[i] Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993, pg. 77.

[ii] Elphinstone, Mountstuart. An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and Its Dependencies. 1842.

[iii] Manchanda, Nivi. ‘The Imperial Sociology of the “Tribe” in Afghanistan.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2018, pp. 165–189, pg. 173.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Manchanda, Nivi. “Rendering Afghanistan Legible: Borders, Frontiers and the ‘State’ of Afghanistan.” Politics, vol. 37, no. 4, 2017, pp. 386–401.

[vi] Ibid, pg. 167.

[vii] Ibid, pg. 397.

[viii] Stanski, Keith.‘So These Folks are Aggressive’: An Orientalist Reading of ‘Afghan Warlords’ Security Dialogue, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009, pp 73-94.