Statebuilding in Afghanistan : a case study of empire in denial
Abstract
This dissertation provides an assessment of statebuilding practices in Afghanistan, focusing on
practitioner experiences in infrastructure and rural development projects. After numerous
interventions and decades of international development, Afghanistan remains a failed state. This
dissertation uses Afghanistan as a case study to address reasons why internationalized
statebuilding projects in the post-Cold War period remain problematic and fraught with
difficulty. Due to a Western denial of real responsibility, which casts international intervention
as neutral assistance to nation states who must ultimately take responsibility for the success or
failure of the policies implemented, Afghanistan’s post-2001 transition into a standalone
democracy has suffered considerable perverse effects and setbacks.
This research is stimulated by scholars like Michael Ignatieff, David Chandler and others, who
have developed a theory of post-Cold war empire-building and associated forms of intervention.
Chandler, in his eponymous book, suggests that these new forms are ‘Empire in Denial’, where
external regulations are driven less by the desire to extend and enforce Western power than they
are by the desire to deny it (2006, p. 18). Empire in Denial explains the maintenance of the
facade of sovereign equality in post-Cold War statebuilding, and the interplay between the desire
of Western actors to create strong democratic states with the concomitant diminution of actual
sovereign rights and domestic control over a state’s political system (Chandler, 2006, p. 78). This
theoretical approach does not subscribe to the idea that simple narcissism is what is driving
modern statebuilding projects. Rather, the desire of Western actors to ‘deny’ aspects of classical
statebuilding is indicative of their lack of confidence in designing or co-designing effective
statebuilding models. This leads to internationally-led efforts that prioritize administrative, social, and technical elements of building a state, and deprioritize the overarching political
components required to effectively govern a democratic state. In doing so, post-Cold War
projects such as Afghanistan have leveled the normative focus of statebuilding to address social
and individual concerns. Concepts of democracy and governance are considered largely as social
concerns; individuals of the state are viewed first and foremost as products of their social
environments, not as key actors in an overarching political initiative. Statebuilding efforts
therefore become primarily social projects, not political ones, where people and communities are
viewed as subjects in need of transformation via external assistance, in order to build their
individual social capacities.
The dissertation’s broad-based case study approach applies a practitioner-focused, constructivist
lens to analyze the Empire in Denial concept in the Afghan context, focusing on key societal and
political variables that impact development efforts and influence governance structures,
including the continuation of Afghanistan’s ‘Great Game’. The findings, extracted through
practitioner and expert interviews, observation, document analysis, review of development
project methodologies, and a comparison against key elements of the Bosnia statebuilding
project, point to the problematic adoption and application of stagnant international development
norms as reasons why statebuilding efforts in Afghanistan in the post-2001 era are failing to
meet their intended political objectives.