1st Edition
Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan Everyday Stories of Intervention
Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan provides a unique insight into the lived realities of the international intervention in Afghanistan and highlights the diversity, relationships, and interdependence of various groups including both external actors and Afghan communities. Analysis of the international intervention in Afghanistan following the post 9/11 invasion in 2001, one of the largest and most expensive in history, tends to focus on the perspective of organisational dynamics and policies or external actors. Drawing on the author’s five years of experience living, researching and working in Afghanistan, this book uses ethnographic methodologies to explore the micro-level interactions between different actors, showing how communities, local leaders, aid workers, UN officials, military and others navigated shifting security, development, and conflict dynamics.
Starting with a contextual introduction to the intervention and the key debates surrounding it, this book goes on to explore the stories of security, development, and violence as constructed through official policy discourse, and then through the lived experiences of interveners and local actors. The book weaves a compelling narrative which links local and global issues and focuses on the everyday practices, relationships and acts of resistance which take place in two provinces of Afghanistan. Finally, the author highlights what this book’s findings mean both for what we know about Afghanistan and for how we understand international interventions and the everyday dynamics between actors who live and work in spaces of conflict.
Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan: Everyday Stories of Intervention will be of considerable interest to scholars and professionals with an interest in Afghanistan, aid work, humanitarian intervention, development studies, and peace and conflict studies.
Introduction 1. The Policy Stories: Afghanistan, Intervention, and Exit 2. The Intervener Stories 3. Civil-Military Stories: Structures, Boundaries, and Hierarchies 4. Qarabagh Stories 5. Behsud Stories Conclusion
Biography
Althea-Maria Rivas is a Lecturer at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London in Development Studies. Her work focuses on the politics of violence, humanitarian intervention, post-conflict reconstruction, and transitional justice. Her academic work is complemented by 12 years of professional experience in diplomacy, development, gender relations, and equality and humanitarian action in Central Asia and East and West Africa.
