Beyond State-Centrism, Towards Acknowledging Relationality: Understanding Afghanistan from an Inter-Asian Perspective

Abstract

Scholars across the social sciences and humanities working on Afghanistan have in recent years sought to explore the country’s dynamics in relation to an inter-Asia approach: that means, moving beyond the discrete study of subregions and focusing instead on connections, circulations, and comparisons within, across, and beyond Asian contexts. This approach has enabled interdisciplinary work on Asia to question taken-for-granted boundaries of nation states, culture areas, and large aggregate societies. It has also challenged the tendency of work in the field to revolve around comparisons between Asia and the West. The withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2021 and the return to power of the Taliban provides a moment to reflect critically on the implications of inter-Asian studies to the analysis of Afghanistan. Historians are increasingly recognising that Afghanistan criss-crosses cultural, political, and economic inter-Asian dynamics; and yet the country is still widely depicted as of marginal significance, both to Asia and to the wider world. This article builds on the inter-Asian studies literature and documents the role that a range of diverse networks comprising mobile people from Afghanistan play: in connecting the country to multiple regional contexts and in mediating the influence of the political trends in these on Afghanistan.