Communal identities and legacies of hegemonic intervention: prospects for justpeace in Afghanistan

Abstract

This thesis seeks to address the following three research questions:

1. How have various communal identity groups and supra-communal understandings of belonging developed and been reproduced in Afghanistan?

2. How have successive hegemonic interventions affected patterns of state-making and civic organisation in Afghanistan?

3. What are the key relational considerations in respect of achieving a future justpeace in Afghanistan?

This thesis examines how identity formation in Afghanistan is shaped by relational ontological insecurity—distinctively deepened and institutionalised during repeated hegemonic interventions— and argues that any future justpeace must therefore be grounded in relational, everyday, and structure–process dynamics that address the affective afterlives of the foregoing rather than interest based models. The above research questions situate this thesis not only within the existing case study scholarship on Afghanistan, but also within the following domains:

- Politically applied psychology (specifically including discussions of self-making and identity group affiliation when faced with dynamic realities, the ‘prototype clarity’ of in-groups, and applied hegemony );

- Ontological security studies (specifically including discussions of anxiety, myth and narratives, habitus, rituals of state sovereignty and self/other relations which arise from the second wave of ontological security studies scholarship); and,

- Justpeace (specifically including discussions of civic sovereignty, a structure-process orientation, and ordering power ).

This broad contribution reflects the transdisciplinary nature of peace and conflict studies as a discipline but also the limitless movement and trajectory of belonging, violence, and peace— each of which are not only political processes, but phenomena continually re-grounded in the affective, relational, routinised practices of the everyday.