| This dissertation responds to a growing body of literature that points to a crisis in post-conflict aid interventions. These complex, costly and risky international undertakings have not only failed to produce desirable results, but have left efforts to effectively and successfully restructure post-war states and societies an elusive goal. Focusing on Afghanistan, I offer a postcolonial analysis to unmask and interrogate the underlying knowledge base and institutionalized sets of power relations that govern post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding interventions in the country. Therefore, this study is preoccupied with not only what we in the west are doing wrong in Afghanistan, but why we are there, how we perceive ourselves and Afghans as well as the way we work and the kinds of relations that are fostered.;This study argues that one can detect the continuity of a colonial worldview in modern statebuilding practices in Afghanistan. As such, interventions primarily rekindle and reassert the west's own sense of meaning and purpose in the country, ensuring that westerners, and not necessarily Afghans, are the primary beneficiaries of post-conflict interventions and that westerners are never made to feel 'out of place' in Afghanistan. Interventions, therefore, construct an outwardly oriented state, responsive to the desires and needs of the international community, rather than being inwardly oriented and responsive to the needs, expectations and lived realities of the majority of Afghans. To substantiate this claim, this dissertation focuses on the concepts of colonial ambivalence and mimicry as well as terra nullius in order to unmask some of the hidden, obscure and implicit assumptions, ideas, values and relations that underpin externally facilitated interventions in Afghanistan. |
