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ABSTRACT
Souvenirs can help illustrate the world-view towards a country under intervention. Following the work of Lisa Smirl, this article analyses a particular set of souvenirs from Afghanistan in order to establish how the intervention there is shaping the imaginary of conflict professionals working in Kabul in the final years of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF). Souvenirs are analysed as consistent with established tropes, in the case of Afghanistan dating back to colonial encounters beginning in the early nineteenth century; much of the ‘Othering' knowledge produced is actualized in souvenirs. In a focused analysis of a Scorpion glass, representing a particular type of souvenir, the articles concludes by showing how what souvenirs transmit is ambiguous and depends on different interpretations and meanings attached to them by different audiences. For conflict professionals who buy these items, they are a way to bridge the gap of their home experience and their life in intervention context. Souvenirs can help mitigate the ‘liminal’ existence that many security professionals, aid workers or embassy staff experience during missions in intervened countries. At the same time, they reify the tropes and narratives about the intervened countries and peoples and thus shape the way interventions are understood, conducted and practised.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper presented at the Workshop ‘Objects and Spaces of Humanitarianism’ on 25 March 2014, honouring Lisa Smirl, as part of International Studies Association, 55th Annual Convention: ‘Spaces and Places: Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization’, 26–29 March 2014, Toronto, and at Queen's Centre for International and Defence Policy, Kingston, Canada, on 21 March 2014. I am grateful for comments on this research by the participants of these events and to the organizers Anna Stavrianakis, John Heathershaw and Tarak Barkawi as well as to Stéfanie von Hlatky and Christian Leuprecht at Queen's for their kind hospitality. Partly, the research has been supported by Konrad Adenauer Foundation and its country office in Kabul, notably Nils Wörmer and Philipp Münch, who took some of the pictures. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, John Heathershaw and Christoph Meyn as well as two anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Michael Sachs helped finding orientation in the world of Arachnidae. While this support is greatly appreciated, any factual or intellectual errors are solely my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Florian P. Kühn is interim professor for Comparative Politics at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. Previously, he was interim Professor for International Relations at Humboldt University at Berlin, research fellow at Queen's University Kingston, ON (Canada) and Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany. In 2010, his book Security and Development in World Society won the German Middle East Studies Association's (DAVO) dissertation award. His research on interventions and statebuilding, ideational and genealogic questions of statehood and international peace, risk and resilience in West Asia as well as on narratives and justifications of politics, has been published in International Relations, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Peacebuilding, Third World Quarterly and International Peacekeeping, among others. Most recently, he co-edited The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace (Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding) together with Mandy Turner (2016). He is co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. ([email protected])
Notes
1. Annemarie Schwarzenberg, Swiss explorer of the late 1930s and other than her colonial contemporaries no prime representative of Orientalist stereotyping and othering, described Afghan women's situation as suppressive to the extent that only ‘misery, no real grief, no regret, no unbroken defiance' would be left of the girls whom she describes as ‘gifted, lively, receptive creatures, a match to the boys, pretty and with shining eyes' (Schwarzenberg Citation2000, 70, 71; author's translation). These women are thus doubly silenced, within the represented reality and by the representation itself.
2. Lady Florentina Sale published one of the earliest accounts of unstable agreements with Afghans in 1843, shifting alliances following obscure estimations of who is on the winning side, and gruesome yet laconic detail of violence inflicted upon the defenceless, women and children (Sale Citation2002). Elphinstone (Citation1819) provides a general characterization of ‘Afghauns’, amending it with details on tribal organization.
3. Bauer (Citation2011, 47) shows in a diachronic analysis how Islam's pre-colonial ambiguity tolerance has quite fundamentally changed. Cultural practice transformed from one embracing and cherishing ambiguity in poetry (which may have taken the form of glorification of the Prophet which could be read as an erotic poem) to one connecting truth claims to single, determined and exclusive meanings (see also on the legal status of foreigners and citizenship Bauer (Citation2011, 349–366). Radical Islam, in this regard, converges with Western scientific thought as it excludes ambiguous interpretations of the world, aiming at an exclusive interpretation of the world.
4. Such an irresolvable situation may, and does in Smirl's account, cause emotional stress. Bauer (2011, 39) succinctly distinguishes between ambivalence (understood as inner state between hatred and love, closeness and distance, between wanting and not-wanting; in other words, a state of emotional indecisiveness) and ambiguity which is outside a person. Ambivalence, thus, is a feeling, a state of emotions, while ambiguity can be observed and is socially constituted. Bauman (Citation2005) uses the term ambivalence in the sense ambiguity is used here, forgoing such terminological clarity.
5. A visit to the International Security Assistance Force's Headquarters (ISAF HQ) in Kabul was denied to the author in 2013. Taking pictures there would not have been possible anyway, as visitors have to leave mobile phones and other electronic equipment such as cameras at the gate for security reasons; previous visits suggest that what is sold there is largely non-ambiguous.
7. Fischer (Citation2006, 303) shows a picture of former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's desk, dated 4 April 2005, which is decorated with roughly two dozen souvenirs, among them placards and polished glass objects like those presented here.
8. The displayed scorpions are presumed to be Buthidae. See http://www.ntnu.no/ub/scorpion-files/afghanistan.php