Afghanistan, Serial War and the Cunning of Imperial Time
While Afghanistan has recently returned to mainstream US media after years of explicit neglect, coverage continues to focus primarily on the last 20 years. US military involvement in Afghanistan however goes back some 43 years to the late Cold War era, to shortly after the Soviet invasion. Drawing on nearly three decades of research in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dr. Anila Daulatzai will trace this longer history of the US presence in Afghanistan, with special attention to the emergence of movements like the Taliban, to the impact of both the extended US presence and the recent US withdrawal for non-elite Afghan women and men, and to terms like occupation, terrorism, liberation, women's rights, and humanitarianism in the context of US-Afghan relations.
Anila Daulatzai is a socio-cultural anthropologist and the Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. She has taught in prisons and universities across three continents. She has been conducting research in Afghanistan as well as with Afghan refugees in Pakistan since 1995. Between 2006 and 2013 she carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and taught at Kabul University and at the American University of Afghanistan. Her past and current research projects look at widowhood, heroin use, and polio through the lens of serial war. Her writings have appeared in various academic journals, as well as Al-Jazeera English, and Jadaliyya. She is currently completing her book manuscript provisionally titled "War and What Remains. Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan".