Paper long abstract:

Political science scholarship on Afghanistan has focused on the topics of violent conflict and state-building from the viewpoints of the local and international elite. In doing so, it makes several assumptions regarding how people in Afghanistan understand their social and political landscape. Namely, this scholarship mirrors the ethnocentrism of the policymakers in Afghanistan by assuming fixed boundaries for groups and social categories. This ethnocentric view from the top orders politics in the country, which makes policy decisions easier for the international community and is in immediate interests of their local partners. This paper challenges these assumptions by shifting the spotlight to everyday life and focuses on perceptions of the state among ordinary people in their daily interactions. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the capital city of Kabul, I aim to understand the ideals of the ordinary people as they describe what they deem to be a legitimate state. This ethnographic approach allows me to unpack the complexities of actors' identities and better understand the ways it affects people's perceptions of the state. I will demonstrate that identities are real but at the same time filled with ambiguities and paradoxes. My fieldwork shows that social identity in Afghanistan does not map neatly onto clear-cut boundaries. Individuals hold multiple, shifting identities. People across different 'identity groups' consider the current state a "mafia." For them, I learned, this term means a pattern of distribution of power and wealth among some elite power-holders who allegedly represent a specific ethnic group. In this rendering of state-as-mafia, the state is illegitimate due to the absence of rigid social identities according to which politics is being ordered in Afghanistan. Thus, contrary to my initial intuition, which was ethnocentric, I find that Afghan civilians reject identity as a legitimate category for political organization. This new angle contributes to the literature by accounting for the view from the bottom up and is complementary to the other narratives of state building in general, and the case of Afghanistan, in particular.