Afghanistan Under Siege

In this book, based on field work undertaken in Afghanistan itself and through engagement with postcolonial theory, Bojan Savic critiques western intervention in Afghanistan by showing how its casting of Afghan natives as “dangerous” has created a power network which fractures the country – in echoes of 19th and 20th century colonial powers in the region. Savic also offers an analysis of how and by what means global security priorities have affected Afghan lives.

Afghanistan Under Siege is a detailed portrait of the fears and fantasies driving twenty-first century colonialism. At the heart of anxiety is the Afghan body, terror in potentia. Controlling, monitoring, securitizing and informalizing it are apparatuses of governance and development running on fantasies, willfully blind to their contradictions. The global war on terror's original target now has its Foucaultian portrait., Bojan Savic’s work on global security is of notable public, scholarly, and political interest. Rooted in local fieldwork on the liminal ‘postcolony’ Herat, it is a timely contribution to a subject of global concern. Insightful and thought-provoking, Savic engages with the mutual, yet ambivalent co-construction and co-dependence of power and resistance. Populating the field of security studies with Heratis and their experiences of oppression, Afghanistan Under Siege visualises the mechanisms that simultaneously create resistance to, and cooperation with materialisations of power-in-the-name-of-security. The internationally-funded structural violence that is so built into, and borne out of, the geopolitical containment of Afghan bodies underlines the continuing importance of challenging the colonial past in our (post)colonial present.

Bojan Savic is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent, and Lecturer in Political Science at the Brussels School of International Studies, Brussels, Belgium.