http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5375-6683
Jennifer L. Fluri and Rachel Lehr. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017. xv and 165 pp., tables, photos, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8203-5035-6); $74.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8203-5034-9).
The Kabul I know is filled with booksellers, beauty schoolers, dressmakers, and tea drinkers. These are some of the evocative subjects used to tell the story of Afghanistan. To echo the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it is the “single story” of this country, narrated for the benefit of Western ears and produced through the past-presents of colonial power. This story offers us a powerful, painful, but oh-so-intoxicating drama of Taliban violence and oppression, and the struggles for personal and political liberation achieved through education, entrepreneurialism, sport, and, of course, makeup. Almost always present in this repertoire is the great white American savior, positioned as a catalyst of transformation, an agent of change: the lost mountaineer who, stumbling on an impoverished village, decides to build them a school; the bored wife who is sure Afghan women need a makeover; the fearless journalist who finds an adept businesswoman beneath that veil (who knew!); and somewhere there, in the fore or background, but always there, an earnest U.S. state.
Not so with Fluri and Lehr. Their account of post–11 September 2001 U.S.-led military humanitarianism refuses the easy romance of these protagonists. Instead they turn our gaze, with force in places, to a different and rarely featured character of Kabul: the carpetbagger. Carefully chosen, the figure originates during the U.S. Civil War, a derogatory term for Northerners capitalizing on Southern postconflict reconstruction. The authors' choice to spotlight this figure reflects the goal of their book as a whole: to disrupt the “single story” of Afghanistan and allow another, intimate and uncomfortable critique of the development industry to unfold.
This story of Kabul is built on their decades-long relationship with Afghans and those who have built careers “saving” them. It is first visually and viscerally communicated through the wall featured on the book's front cover and graffitied with the words “Yankee Go Home.” Freshly painted when the authors first come across it, just a year later the wall is already crumbling. The words, and their decay, indicate the failures, or rather the destructive successes, of the humanitarianism that Fluri and Lehr take on.
The book's opening chapters provide the intellectual framing for the piece. Chapter 1 is a geopolitical contextualization of Afghanistan, one sharply inflected by gendered power. We learn not just about its colonial histories, its internal politics, the form and nature of Western military and humanitarian intervention, and its fraught position as a battleground for major powers over the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Their careful work moves the analysis beyond an accounting of this history to a critique of its narration, demonstrating the orientalist lens through which Afghan people and places, and particularly Afghan women, have become known to the West. They show that the act, and the telling of the act, cannot be separated. In each case we are made to understand how gendered and racialized imaginaries—the veiled and victimized Afghan woman, the tough military man, and the liberatory potentials of consumption—are rooted in racially fraught colonial pasts. Here they show how women's bodies, and claims of their liberation, have long formed a powerfully seductive and violent geopolitical battleground and used as justification for the early stages of warfare in the twenty-first century.
For Fluri and Lehr, humanitarian intervention has roots in these military grounds, and in chapter 2 they introduce us to its key actors. Their account of the carpetbagger provides both a grounded analysis of this multibillion-dollar “auxiliary economy” and a fascinating spatial analysis. The authors show how discourses of security, with their own roots in the colonial tropes detailed in chapter 1, produce a “geography of separation,” structuring the everyday lives of international aid workers and locals in Kabul. This massive humanitarian industry has complex political-economic drivers, well-interrogated elsewhere. In chapter 3, though, Fluri and Lehr take on their embodied and affective underpinnings via the gendered currency of grief, vulnerability, and heroism. Bringing together Agamben's work on bare life, exception, and potentiality; Butler's precarity and grievability; and Debord's “societal spectacles,” we arrive at the intellectual heart of the project: to show how discursive representations of gendered corporeal vulnerability have manifested into different forms of currency, with violent and profitable geopolitical and economic ends. This provides the intellectual foundations for the varied U.S.–Afghan entanglements detailed in the remainder of the book.
Central to Fluri and Lehr's analysis is a feminist attention to fraught, complex, and deeply affective relationships, and their work to enable, justify, and profit from war and peace through humanitarian development. For example, chapter 6 tells a story of the ties between Soraya, an Afghan woman keen to pursue her education in the United States, and her U.S. employer Jane, who sponsors her travel there. Similarly, chapter 7 examines the meaningful, emotional, fraught, financial ties that connect Afghan and U.S. widows of war. The authors don't shy away from these difficult and complicated relationships. They sympathetically, but incisively, illuminate the lingering work of Orientalism in positioning Afghan women as in need of saving, and benevolent Westerners as those most appropriate for the job.
Although captivating, the authors' interest in relationships also extends beyond the human, attending to the sedimentation of power in landscapes, locales, and objects: the graffitied wall described earlier; the homes where Afghan women embroider goods for sale in the United States; and the U.S. Kabul embassy bar where ex-pats and internationally sourced sex workers mingle. This resonates with exciting emergent work by feminist political geographers on things and their affects: a very fleshy new materialism that engages with embodied racial, gendered, classed, and other logics of power. The kitschification of disaster is jolting in its violent ordinariness, and points to the everyday terrain of war in new and revelatory ways: the “Done That!” Operation Enduring Freedom mug, the military tank-shaped ice cube holder, or the “Duck and Cover” soft toy. It also makes clear, though, that it is through these means, these objects, along with those a host of others—some much more terrifying than the mugs or soft toys, of course—that such relationships are made and sustained.
Given their incisive feminist geopolitical lens, it is no surprise that the book is a devastating critique of U.S.-led humanitarianism—its corruption, hypocrisy, and delusion—and its reliance on the affective currencies of grief, vulnerability, and heroism. Their analysis attends to the quotidian impacts of military and humanitarian practice for those subjects and spaces more commonly feminized, trivialized, elided, or simplified in academic and popular accounts. Accordingly, Fluri and Lehr viscerally demonstrate that women's bodies are a battleground for military, humanitarian, and commercial intervention. It is depressing and refreshing, but most productively it is uncomfortable, troubling so many taken-for-granted assumptions “we” might hold dear. The feminist intervention and insight of this project goes much further, however, pushing an understanding of the “macro” geopolitics and geoeconomics of conflict and humanitarianism as always, already embodied. They show us how humanitarianism operates, demonstrating the powerful and gendered currencies of grief that justify, maintain, and deepen intervention in Afghanistan and its intractable and highly profitable positioning in war and peace.
The book offers important insights for wider geopolitical work. Certainly Fluri and Lehr's analysis of “postpeace” humanitarianism resonates with scenes unfolding in other cities emerging from, yet still mired within, conflict. In places like Juba, capital of the new Republic of South Sudan, for example, women also are crucially positioned in histories of war, in postconflict development initiatives, and in important grassroots peace-building efforts. Their framing then is incredibly productive, offering rich insights for our understanding of development, militarism, and the securitization of humanitarianism in political geography and across political science, international relations, anthropology, and other fields engaging with these topics. This is vital work, not least because there remains limited grounded research on Afghanistan in our field, despite the country's long-standing geopolitical importance and the devastating intractability of the conflict, which together demand greater ethnographic attention.
Of course, from feminist political geographers we expect nothing less. Fluri and Lehr bring together well-established work from critical development studies and critical geopolitics, underpinned by an instructive “global intimate” analysis feminist political geographers developed and insist on. Indeed, they demonstrate that the geopolitical cannot be fully understood without this kind of scalar analysis. As a result, theirs is not a heavy-handed dismissal of every form of U.S. engagement. What they bring, besides their brave affront to the dogma of U.S. liberal humanitarianism, and their efforts to do this kind of work in such a challenging time and place, is the refusal of any easy binaries, any rendering of the well-meaning Americans as ghoulish as the Afghan bookseller is progressive, the cosmetologist transgressive, and the dressmaker entrepreneurial. Moving beyond such stereotypes, they instead consider the complexities and ambivalences of those embroiled in this humanitarian world.
Adichie tells us that the problem with the “single story” is not necessarily that the stereotypes it creates are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. She calls on us to tell and listen for other stories, stories that unearth the deeper past-presents of colonial engagement, that disrupt our orientalist assumptions by narrating the spaces outside of, escaped from, and resistant to colonial urges. Certainly, there are other stories of Afghanistan to be told—and Fluri and Lehr share some of these with us. It is difficult work, demanding fine-grained attention, slow scholarship, and years fostering trusting and respectful relationships with communities. Feminist studies like theirs lead the way for existing and future work on the intractable conflicts that form some of the most pressing issues of our time.
But there remain other stories to tell of this complex place. So few make it to the ears and eyes of Western communities whose states operate in Afghanistan. Although we have spent decades critiquing conflict and postconflict development, recognizing its colonial, heteronormative, racist, and patriarchal military might, so few of our geographic stories are narrated by authors living, writing, and thinking within these areas of conflict. Where they are writing, we must work harder as a discipline to hear and value them. Fluri and Lehr's work richly complicates and diversifies work on geopolitics within geography and development studies. Here, though, the work of Black and Indigenous geographies offers an important complement. In classroom settings and future research, this book must be read in conversation with these strands of critical geographic analysis. This will further deepen our understanding of the colonial present, both as it operates in places like Afghanistan, and as it continues to connect this country to colonial formations elsewhere.
ORCiD
Caroline Faria 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5375-6683