The Pashtunistan Issue in Light of Uneven and Combined Development: Pashtun Nationalism and Nation Buidling

Date

2023-10-23

Author

Bordonaro, Lorenzo

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The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the historical development of Afghanistan in light of the Uneven and Combined Development Thesis. Focusing on the interrelation between the domestic and the international, this thesis aims to explain how the interactions of Afghanistan with its neighbors and the world, in general, have actively shaped not only the historical form of the Afghan state but also the problem of identity in a multi-cultural region. In this regard, this thesis will actively explain the nexus between the Pashtunistan policy of 1947, initiated by the Afghan government, and the problem of modernization in Afghanistan. In particular, the focus will rest on the Anglo-Afghan Wars since they will be framed as the events that strengthened tribalism and Islam vis a vis other possible identities. This thesis will therefore address how this policy derives from the contradictions that the combined development has caused within the country, particularly the problem of a state inserted within the international environment with resulting opportunities and tensions, and a society very much inward which represented also AthreatincaseOfdrasticreforms.Therefore, this thesis will also explain how the Pashtunistan policy does not represent only a way to assert a form of ethnic nationalism, but also to transform the Pashtuns into “modern” citizens, in an environment where loyalty, rather than the state, laid mostly in local societies and tribes.

Subject Keywords

Nation Building, Nationalism, Uneven and Combined Development, Foreign Policy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105636

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis