The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements
Intimate Development, Geopolitics, and the Currency of Gender and Grief
Jennifer L. Fluri
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Imprint: University of Georgia Press
Published: 01/2017
Pages: 188
Subject: Social Science, Political Science, History
Print ISBN: 9780820350356
eBook ISBN: 9780820350332
DESCRIPTION
The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by United States and coalition
forces was followed by a flood of aid and development dollars and
“experts” representing well over two thousand organizations—each
with separate policy initiatives, geopolitical agendas, and
socioeconomic interests. This book examines the everyday actions of
people associated with this international effort, with a special
emphasis on small players: individuals and groups who charted
alternative paths outside the existing networks of aid and
development. This focus highlights the complexities, complications,
and contradictions at the intersection of the everyday and the
geopolitical, showing how dominant geopolitical narratives
influence daily life in places like Afghanistan—and what happens
when the goals of aid workersor the needs of aid recipients do not
fit the narrative.
Specifically, this book examines the use of gender, “need,” and
grief as drivers for both common and exceptional responses to
geopolitical interventions.Throughout this work, Jennifer L. Fluri
and Rachel Lehr describe intimate encounters at a microscale to
complicate and dispute the ways in which Afghans and their country
have been imagined, described, fetishized, politicized, vilified,
and rescued. The authors identify the ways in which Afghan men and
women have been narrowly categorized as perpetrators and victims,
respectively. They discuss several projects to show how gender and
grief became forms of currency that were exchanged for different
social, economic, and political opportunities. Such entanglements
suggest the power and influence of the United States while
illustrating the ways in which individuals and groups have
attempted to chart alternative avenues of interaction,
intervention, and interpretation.
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