Historicizing Afghanistan as a ‘Question’
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and Zoom.
In 1878, Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, a former Viceroy of India (1872-1876), delivered a speech before the House of Lords entitled "The Afghan Question". This was during the second Anglo-Afghan war (1878-1881), when Russian expansion appeared to threaten British India from the north. The title of this speech wasn't accidental. It reveals how Afghanistan was imagined during the bordering process that created modern Afghanistan's boundaries (1860s-1890s): not as a sovereign nation with its own history and agency, but as a problem for the British Empire to solve. This framing of Afghanistan as a 'question' inaugurates a pattern that persists 150 years later. My presentation traces this enduring imperial framing from British colonial archives to contemporary American policy and knowledge production, showing how Afghanistan has been consistently constructed as an imperial problem that forecloses Afghans’ agency. I argue that positioning Afghanistan as a "question" requiring Western answers is a Eurocentric expression which denies Afghans permission to narrate their own history and politics.
About the Speaker
Nasema Zeerak is a PhD candidate at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Her dissertation challenges dominant Eurocentric discourses to open space for other possibilities of political thought and practice from the vantage point of Afghanistan. Her research has been supported by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, Immigration History Research Center, and International Studies Association amongst others.