Decolonizing Afghanistan

Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power

By: Wazhmah Osman (Editor), Robert Crews (Editor)

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Paperback | 28 October 2025

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As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan's past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. Featuring new and often sidelined ground-up perspectives this collection examines how Afghan communities have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. Contributors interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power to analyze how narratives about Afghanistan have framed and legitimated imperial governance. Topics span the contradictions and consequences of the US "forever" War, the rise of private security contracting, the deployment of biometric and surveillance technologies, the politics of US and Taliban counter-media operations, the evolution of gender discourses, and the mobilization of Afghan-Americans and "Afghan Culture," among others. Throughout, contributors draw important connections and insights to ongoing global anticolonial struggles and offer new decolonial futures. Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri

Industry Reviews

"Groundbreaking, refreshing, eloquent, and powerful, Decolonizing Afghanistan makes a crucial intervention into the knowledge produced on Afghanistan in the United States and more broadly. It provides nuance, depth, and original perspectives in its analysis of Afghanistan's social, political, economic, and intellectual histories, and in its unique approach of decoloniality. Thanks to its wide scope and analytical richness, it represents a turning point in the dominant understanding of Afghanistan." - Zahra Ali, author of Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation

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