Landscapes of power: local struggles and national stakes at the rural-urban fringe of Kabul, Afghanistan

Abstract

This article shows the coexistence of the language of legal claims and the use of violence as constitutive modes of getting control over resources. Through the analysis of a specific case of land dispute east of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, we aim at revealing how local struggles are linked to broader geographies of power. Following important changes in the material conditions in Afghanistan, which have led to the expansion of the city and the transformation of the rural-urban fringe, territorialized power appears as a pre-condition to control the circulation of people, goods and money, information and ideas, allowing us to add landscapes, the circulation of land, to the five categories famously distinguished by Appadurai as a way of organizing the study of the world's culture and economy.

Keywords:

• Afghanistan
• land control
• legal claims
• violence
• power
• landscape
• nomads

Notes

¹Authors’ interviews with the Mayor of Kabul, M. Yunus Nawandish, February and April 2012, who referred to an aerial survey conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (see Watanabe 2010).

²Authors’ interview with the UNHCR officer in charged of displaced people in the Afghan capital, Kabul Office in Kabul, February 2012. These figures are consistent with those given by the Mayor of Kabul.

³The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that USD 4 trillion has been spent and obligated by the American government in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since 9/11: Watson Institute (2011).

⁴1 jerib = 0.2 ha or 2000 square meters. In the city, the measure biswa is more common, with 20 biswa equalling 1 jerib. We have indicated jerib nonetheless throughout the text for better comparison with the land units more common in rural areas.

⁵As Kakar (1979) points out, the road lost some of its importance when the Amir built another one through the Tangi Gharu (completed in August 1886 but only opened officially to traffic in 1899), which was considerably shorter; but after the amir's death the newly built road through the Tangi Gharu was abandoned again.

⁶Decree 62 dated 21 July 2008 regarding the enactment of Law on Managing Land Affairs.

⁷The New Silk Road Initiative (NSRI) that seeks to foster regional economic cooperation could eventually lead to greater importance for Afghanistan as a transportation corridor and ceteris paribus increase traffic (Auswärtiges Amt. 2011). Furthermore, the Ainak copper mine is located approximately 40% on Khak-e Jabbar territory, with the rest in the Mohammad Agha district of Logar.

⁸For a comprehensive discussion of the term Kuchi and the way its meaning has changed, see Tapper (2008).

⁹Term designating the most important landowners and tribal leaders.

¹⁰See Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont (1988) or Schetter, who argues that as ‘an ethnic category, Tajik refers ultimately to the residual quantity of any Sunni Persian speaking people with no common ancestral mythology’ (2005, 67).

¹¹For a general discussion of this kind of processes, see Jacob and Le Meur (2010).

¹²The construction of claims expresses a conception of property rights or rights of access to resources as well as a conception of political order. They are thus an important aspect in constituting political communities. See Jacob and Le Meur (2010).

¹³The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan adopted January 26, 2004. Unofficial English translation: see Afghan Web, n.d.

¹⁴Znoj (1995) articulates this idea through an analytical distinction between ‘liquidating’ and ‘non-liquidating transactions’. Non-liquidating transactions entail future obligations, while liquidating transactions are exchanges releasing both parties from all future obligations and characteristic of monetized market economies. In this model, most real type exchange relations are asymmetrically composed of liquidating and non-liquidating transactions.

Additional information

Nick Miszak is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on the political economy of land ownership in post-2001 Afghanistan. Working as a researcher in Afghanistan since 2007, he has extensive policy-oriented research experience on land-based conflicts, formal and informal justice, internal displacement, and peace and reintegration. He holds a bilingual (German/French) MA in Social Science from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland (2006). Email: [email protected]

Alessandro Monsutti is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. He has carried out extensive field research in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran since the mid-1990s, and more recently in the Western countries among Afghan refugees and migrants. He is currently working on the political economy of rural rehabilitation in Afghanistan. His is the author of War and migration: social networks and economic strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan (2005) and co-editor of several volumes, including The other Shiites: from the Mediterranean to Central Asia (with S. Naef and F. Sabahi, 2007) and Le monde turco-iranien en question (with M.-R. Djalili and A. Neubauer, 2008). Email: [email protected]