Introduction
In August 2021, the world watched as the Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan and US forces withdrew. Live media images of thousands of Afghans desperate to flee Kabul marked the end of a two-decade foreign occupation. In the months that followed, the Taliban reinstated severe restrictions on women’s education, employment, and mobility, while Western leaders affirmed continuing commitments to human rights.Footnote 1 Despite these pronouncements, there was a profound sense of betrayal, captured by an Afghan woman who noted to The Independent: ‘They made our lives hell and then buried us in this hell forever.’Footnote 2 This abandonment was not merely a geopolitical retreat; it reflected a global unravelling of liberal commitments to gender justice, recently mirrored in domestic policy shifts such as the US executive order rolling back women’s and LGBTQI+ rights.Footnote 3 Together, these developments signal a critical moment for rethinking the discursive and material landscapes of intervention, gender, and liberal governance.
Although separated by geography and time, these events expose the core contradictions of liberalism’s normative promises. Critical feminist scholars have long highlighted the foundational violence of liberal governance, which relies on interventionist regimes anchored in hegemonic masculinity, race, class, and colonial power.Footnote 4 The US-led mission in Afghanistan exemplifies how the promotion of women’s rights, often deployed under the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) framework, functioned as an instrument of strategic legitimation rather than a genuine normative priority.Footnote 5 As intervention evolved into ‘coercive humanitarianism’ or ‘humanitarian militarism’,Footnote 6 local insecurities deepened.Footnote 7
While existing literature extensively critiques how Western powers invoked women’s protection to justify intervention,Footnote 8 it frequently obscures the implications of liberal state-building for non-normative gendered and sexualized subjects. We address this gap by examining the practice of Bacha Bazi, literally ‘boy-play’ or ‘dancing boys’.Footnote 9 The limited but valuable research on Afghan sexualities that does exist, although not all specifically focused on Bacha Bazi, is itself divided: some studies critique the instrumentalization of sexuality within liberal peacebuilding,Footnote 10 while others instead mobilize the suffering of these marginalized groups to justify further liberal interventions.Footnote 11 Historically rooted in complex aesthetic, pedagogical, and patronage relations involving subjects of admiration (bacha, shahid, amrad, bacha birish),Footnote 12 decades of war and state fragmentation transformed Bacha Bazi into an institution of coercion, trafficking, and child sexual abuse.Footnote 13 Wealthy patrons acquire boys as markers of financial and social prestige, forcing them to perform at celebrations while subjecting them to sexual exploitation.Footnote 14
However, it is important not to flatten this category of boys into passive victims alone. In a context where rigid gender norms prevail and homosexuality is stigmatized, Bacha Bazi boys (or bacha) are often feminized, labelled immoral, and socially ostracized. They are viewed as occupying a degraded social position, and families may isolate them for fear of reputational harm. Yet many boys navigate these conditions within a set of severely constrained choices, sometimes seeking protection, economic survival, or patronage in environments marked by insecurity and poverty. Recognizing these dynamics does not deny exploitation; rather, it situates the boys’ experiences within broader political, economic, and gendered structures shaped by decades of conflict.
Moving beyond analyses that focus strictly on women, this article interrogates how liberal interventions deploy gendered and sexualized narratives to legitimize external involvement while simultaneously preserving local and global power hierarchies. Drawing on critical feminist and queer theories of war,Footnote 15 we examine how the sexed body is transformed into a site of procurement, consumption, and political trade-off.Footnote 16 We theorize the liberal interventionist order as a violent, gendered regimeFootnote 17 that selectively frames which lives are considered worthy of protection and which are structurally rendered ungrievable.Footnote 18
The article proceeds as follows. After detailing our methodology, we trace the history of foreign occupation and examine gendered intervention narratives in Afghanistan; we then construct our theoretical framework on gendered violence regimes. The subsequent sections present our findings across three central themes: ‘Fighting Terrorists, Saving Women and Sacrificing Boys’, ‘Dancing to the Tunes of Peacebuilders’, and ‘The Collateral Body: Bacha Unseen, Unspoken, Unmourned’. We conclude by demonstrating how the sacrifice and co-optation of marginalized sexual subjects are not operational oversights, but constitutive features of liberal governance.
Methodology
For this study, we gathered both primary and secondary data from Afghanistan. Primary data were collected through twelve semi-structured interviews conducted between June and December 2016 via telephone, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. All interviewees are originally from Northern Afghanistan. At the time of the interviews, ten were living and working in Afghanistan, while two were members of the Afghan diaspora in Australia. Participants were selected based on their expertise and familiarity with the Western occupation of Afghanistan and the practice of Bacha Bazi as part of their lived and professional realities. This purposive sampling strategy enabled us to gather informed, insider perspectives grounded in first-hand experience.
Most of the interviewees had worked as lawyers, journalists, civil society and human rights activists, and/or non-governmental organization employees. Several had direct experience working with child survivors of sexual harassment and abuse. Nine of the twelve resided in areas where Bacha Bazi was widely practised, providing detailed contextual insights. Although we initially intended to conduct a larger number of interviews, the extreme political and cultural sensitivity of the topic required us to limit the sample to twelve participants. The subject of Bacha Bazi is surrounded by collective silence, stigma, and fear. As we learned during fieldwork, Afghans are often willing to discuss positive aspects of their culture but feel deep discomfort and shame when addressing practices perceived as dishonourable, especially with outsiders or individuals from other ethnic groups. As one participant explained, ‘Honour is very important for Afghans. They can do anything to preserve their honour. Bacha Bazi damages people’s collective honour.’ There are relatively few people who may want to uncover this open secret, which makes it hard for researchers to investigate it.
Despite the relatively small number of interviews, the depth and richness of participants’ accounts, combined with extensive secondary sources, allowed us to mitigate limitations related to sample size. Secondary materials included peer-reviewed scholarship as well as credible grey literature such as international media reports, think-tank analyses, documentation from international and national non-governmental organizations, official publications from Afghan government bodies, and publicly accessible visual media, including documentaries and online videos. These sources helped us contextualize and triangulate our findings, and identify broader discursive patterns.
All interviews were conducted in Farsi (Dari) and Shoughnani by the first author, who is a native speaker of both languages; he grew up in Northern Afghanistan and is familiar with its history, politics, culture, and the context of intervention and its aftermath. He has witnessed the fear surrounding Bacha Bazi and later worked as a human rights professional with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission between 2016 and 2019. Conducting interviews in local languages was crucial for building trust and ensuring cultural sensitivity. As there are a number of local expressions and terminologies specific to Bacha Bazi, understanding and being able to converse in the vernacular went beyond language as a mere communicative tool. It also enabled entry into the symbolic world of the participants, allowing us to make sense of the topic and to better understand Afghanistan’s dynamic cultural and historical context.
At the beginning of each interview, the first author obtained consent for the use of data for scholarly purposes. To protect confidentiality, all notes, transcripts, and audio recordings were stored digitally under pseudonyms. Although direct or verbatim translation is not possible from the languages used to conduct the interviews, the authors tried to mitigate risks of misinterpretation by double-checking on the meanings assigned by the interviewees to certain idioms, expressions, and slang terms.
For ethical reasons, we did not interview any boys involved in Bacha Bazi. Given our previous experiences as researchers working on topics of sexual and gender-based violence, we were mindful of the risk of re-traumatization and the ethical implications of asking survivors to recount deeply painful experiences. Interviewing survivors could have required them to reveal their identities in contexts where stigma and danger persist. We therefore adhered to the decolonial principle of the ‘right to opacity’, understood both as an epistemological stance and an ethical-political commitment. The right to opacity recognizes individuals as irreducible subjects whose lives and experiences cannot be fully captured, exposed, or translated into universal research frameworks.Footnote 19 It challenges the assumption that visibility and disclosure automatically produce legitimacy or credibility. Respecting this principle meant acknowledging that survivors’ unknowability and silence may themselves constitute forms of agency and protection.
To analyse our data, we applied frame analysis,Footnote 20 an element of Critical Discourse Analysis, to uncover the underlying power dynamics and ideologies embedded in the discourses on Afghanistan as used by different actors, external and internal. Frame analysis enabled us to identify how different actors select, organize, emphasize, and omit aspects of reality to construct particular interpretations.Footnote 21 We treated framing as an active process through which certain meanings are made salient while others are marginalized. Through systematic examination of our primary and secondary data, we identified several dominant frames, including the ‘war on terror’, ‘Western occupation/occupiers’, ‘deviant Muslims’, and ‘paedophile regional strongmen’. These frames operate as cognitive structures that shape how events and identities are interpreted and communicated to different audiences.
In relation to Bacha Bazi, we use frame analysis to critically examine how liberal Western actors frame security, peace, rescue, gender, women, and queerness via-à-vis the non-liberal Other and how these have been deployed to generate specific intelligible frameworks for consumption by a Western public, thereby maintaining hierarchical power relations between intervening forces and the populations they represent, as well as among Afghan actors themselves.Footnote 22 We were thus able to shed light on how certain groups, particularly LGBTQI + individuals and young boys, are marginalized or stigmatized through specific framing techniques, as well as the ideological underpinnings of such frames and the broader discourses of Western external interventions.
Afghanistan as a theatre of global gendered politics
Afghanistan has long resisted foreign invasions from the British in the 19th century, and the Soviets in the 20th, to US-led coalitions in the 21st. This history has earned it the moniker ‘the graveyard of empires’.Footnote 23 Beyond battlefield resistance, Afghanistan has also been a site of epistemic struggle, in which global powers attempted to control not only its territory but also the narratives that define it. Understanding Afghanistan’s entanglement with imperial, regional, and liberal internationalist agendas requires close examination of how power operates discursively, militarily, and ideologically, and how certain groups have been incorporated and co-opted in the discursive construction of what Afghanistan is.
Before the arrival of European empires, Afghanistan formed a shifting frontier between Persian, Indian, and Central Asian powers. With British and Russian imperial expansions, it became institutionalized as a buffer state, lacking full sovereignty. As Rubin observes, British aid enabled a repressive yet stabilized Afghan state, while the 1907 Anglo-Russian treaty formally defined its role within a regulated imperial competition.Footnote 24 These arrangements were less about Afghan autonomy than about managing interimperial rivalry. Modern narratives about Afghanistan continue to be shaped by the liberal West’s strategic needs. As Manchanda argues, the ‘idea’ of Afghanistan is a discursive construction. This construction is neither static nor internally coherent; it is marked by contradictions, ruptures, and ambivalences with the familiar ‘oriental gaze’.Footnote 25
US policy towards Afghanistan evolved across administrations, reflecting shifting assumptions and goals.Footnote 26 A dominant post-9/11 narrative framed Afghanistan as the ‘battlefront against terrorism’, spotlighting groups such as al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and later ISIS. Under George W. Bush, intervention was framed as part of the ‘war on terror’, and a moral mission to promote dignity. In 2002, Bush declared that the US would stand up for ‘the non-negotiable demands of human dignity’, initiating a shift from counterterrorism to state-building.Footnote 27 Barack Obama continued the legitimization of international intervention under the banner of global security by stating in 2016: ‘I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.… We give our Afghan partners the very best opportunity to succeed.’Footnote 28 His strategy combined troop surges with governance reform, reflecting a liberal peacebuilding model grounded in neoliberal values: freedom, democracy, rule of law, and free markets.Footnote 29 However, this ‘state-building at gunpoint’ faced serious and contradictory challenges, including weak institutions, regional strongmen politics, and dependency on external aid.Footnote 30 Donald Trump’s first Presidency reversed course, emphasizing withdrawal and direct negotiations with the Taliban, culminating in the 2020 Doha Agreement.Footnote 31
Each shift introduced further contradictions, highlighting the incoherence of external intervention in a context as fluid and complex as Afghanistan. Scholarly analyses offer more nuanced interpretations than the cut and dried terror-centric policy view. Goodhand situated Afghanistan within a regional conflict system shaped by Pakistan, Iran, and India’s proxy strategies.Footnote 32 Drawing on Murshed’s conceptualization of civil war and the role of external involvement, the war in Afghanistan can be understood as an internationalized civil war, in which domestic conflict dynamics became deeply entangled with foreign military and political intervention.Footnote 33 Others cast the US–Afghan war in ideological terms, as a clash of Western liberalism versus traditional Afghan socio-political orders,Footnote 34 or geopolitically, as reflected in Biden’s remarks: ‘Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia would love nothing more than the US to continue to funnel billions … into stabilizing Afghanistan.’Footnote 35
Throughout these interventions, gendered narratives played a central role. The Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war reshaped masculinities and femininities. Kandiyoti describes how the Mujahideen enabled the Taliban to initially gain support as enforcers of order, only to then entrench patriarchal controls over women’s bodies in the name of honour.Footnote 36 The US-led invasion similarly used gendered tropes to legitimate intervention. Laura Bush invoked the need to ‘save Afghan women’, equating feminism with militarism.Footnote 37 This liberal feminist endorsement of military action masked the ongoing harms of war, which disproportionately affected Afghan women and marginalized communities. As Engle argues, such ‘moral’ objectives deflected scrutiny from the broader economic and political damage inflicted by intervention.Footnote 38 The 2021 US withdrawal reignited global anxiety over Afghan women’s futures, with the Taliban’s return intensifying restrictions and illustrating the cyclical nature of gendered violence under successive regimes.Footnote 39
Solomon calls for attention to the ‘more fluid affective conditions and processes’ from which security-seeking subjects emerge.Footnote 40 Gendered narratives militarize masculinity and feminize vulnerability, portraying Afghan women as passive victims to be saved, while sidelining their agency. Afghanistan’s symbolic role within global discourse reflects what Manchanda calls quasi-coloniality: not fully colonized yet continuously subjected to indirect imperial rule.Footnote 41 This marginality enabled imperial powers to maintain dominance without formal colonization, creating a phantom presence of empire that shaped institutions, policies, and knowledge.
The evolution of intervention in Afghanistan, from defeating terrorism to state-building and then full withdrawal, ultimately became a cautionary tale of liberal peacebuilding. The US and its allies implemented a top-down, technocratic peace agenda involving governance reform, security sector restructuring, constitution writing, and macroeconomic stabilization. But these interventions failed to establish legitimacy, resolve structural inequalities, or prevent recurring violence. As Kaviraj reminds us, liberal politics cannot supplant traditional logics simply through imported institutions.Footnote 42 The fall of the post-2001 Afghan government within weeks of the US withdrawal marked one of the swiftest collapses in modern history, highlighting the fragility of externally imposed order.Footnote 43 Rather than liberation, intervention brought a complex tapestry of coercion, epistemic violence, and gendered exploitation, leaving Afghanistan at the crossroads of empire once again.
Rethinking liberal interventions: liberal peace as violent and patriarchal spectacle
We draw on queer theory, building on feminist thought, to understand how liberal interventionist orders are embedded in violence. Queer theory does more than add gender and sexual minorities as analytic variables; it interrogates how hegemonic and marginalized norms around gender and sexuality are produced, circulated, and contested in global power structures. We situate our analysis within queer conflict scholarship, which examines how knowledge about conflict is produced and how gender/sexuality norms are mobilized within security and peacebuilding projects.Footnote 44
To deepen this critique, we engage the concept of ‘violence regimes’ elaborated by Hearn and colleagues, which theorizes violence not as episodic or exceptional, but as systemic and integral to governance. Violence regimes shape what counts as violence, who is considered victim or perpetrator, and how interventions are legitimized across micro, meso, and macro levels.Footnote 45 This question of who is recognized as a victim is not incidental but political: Butler asks whether the distress and grief triggered by loss reflect a collective recognition of human vulnerability and mutual responsibility, or whether such grief is selectively maintained and withheld for political ends.Footnote 46 We return to this tension in our empirical analysis, where it helps explain why certain bodies remain excluded from frameworks of protection even as others are centred within them. Violence therefore becomes both the cause and the consequence of social order.Footnote 47 This framework allows us to examine liberal peace interventions not as neutral or benevolent projects, but as regimes of violence embedded in patriarchal, racialized, and sexualized power relations.
The liberal interventionist regime as a gendered and sexualized violence regime
Gendered and sexualized power relations are central to liberal peace interventions. These interventions are informed by liberal Western institutions, which use selective representations of gender and sexuality to marginalize non-conforming bodies in the global South while reinforcing their own authority.Footnote 48 Feminist scholarship argues that peacebuilding and state-building interventions rely on essentialist tropes: women as victims, men as patriarchal threats, and queer subjects as both perverse and victimized.Footnote 49 The liberal peace order thus becomes a patriarchal spectacle: it positions liberal patriarchy as benevolent and progressive while demonizing illiberal patriarchy.Footnote 50 The ‘protection’ of women and LGBTQI+ persons becomes a legitimizing device for military operations.Footnote 51 Similarly, international donors often regulate states that criminalize homosexuality through aid conditionality and diplomatic pressure, framing decriminalization as a prerequisite for continued financial support.Footnote 52 These dynamics reveal that liberal peace initiatives do not challenge patriarchal structures but manage them, often under the illusion of feminist or queer inclusion.Footnote 53 Queer analyses show that such protection frameworks institutionalize a binary, heteronormative understanding of gender that renders LGBTQI+ individuals largely invisible within conflict and post-conflict policy.Footnote 54 These tropes are often racialized and sexualized, serving to obscure structural causes of conflict while reinforcing the moral superiority of the liberal order.Footnote 55
Jasbir Puar’s concept of ‘homonationalism’ illuminates this dynamic. Homonationalism describes the alignment of LGBTQI+ rights with nationalist ideologies.Footnote 56 Selective LGBTQI+ inclusion is mobilized to signal national modernity and progress, while simultaneously legitimizing exclusionary politics and interventionist practices. Some queer subjects are aligned with the liberal order (‘normal’ homosexuals), while others (‘perverse’ or racialized queers) are cast as threats requiring intervention.Footnote 57 Patriarchy becomes acceptable when reframed as liberal protection. From the perspective of violence regimes, this reflects what Hearn and colleagues describe as the autotelic nature of violence: violence that becomes self-justifying and is pursued for its own sake.Footnote 58 Liberal peace does not eliminate violence; it governs and redistributes it in ways that maintain its legitimacy. Feminist peace scholars similarly caution that rhetorical commitments to gender equality are hollow when security remains defined primarily through militarized frameworks rather than social justice.Footnote 59
Afghanistan and queer-patriarchal violence regimes
Afghanistan exemplifies how liberal peace operates as a violence regime. Liberal discourse consistently framed Afghan women as victims needing rescue, thereby legitimizing intervention.Footnote 60 Afghan men and boys were also pathologized, represented either as sexually deviant threats or as powerless victims.Footnote 61 This duality illustrates how the ‘illiberal other’ is paradoxically too masculine and not masculine enough, reinforcing the moral superiority of the liberal self.Footnote 62
Violence against marginalized bodies, as in the case of Bacha Bazi, becomes legible within liberal discourse only when it reinforces interventionist narratives. Rather than addressing structural oppression or empowering local queer voices, such suffering is mobilized to legitimize geopolitical projects.Footnote 63 As Massad argues, even certain Western LGBTQI+ movements may reproduce this logic by universalizing homosexuality as a fixed identity aligned with Western sexual subjectivity.Footnote 64 This universalizing impulse risks intensifying surveillance, backlash, and criminalization in local contexts, thereby producing new vulnerabilities that ultimately serve geopolitical agendas more than the lives they claim to protect. Peacebuilding efforts in Afghanistan have also marginalized LGBTQI+ communities, failing to recognize their agency and excluding them from post-conflict processes.Footnote 65 This exclusion reflects a broader pattern identified in queer security scholarship, where LGBTQI+ lives fall outside the dominant gender logics of peace and security governance.Footnote 66 Power operates through selective inclusion and exclusion where bodies may be rescued, abandoned, or annihilated depending on how they fit into liberal scripts.Footnote 67 Feminist movements have similarly been co-opted or sidelined, as grassroots struggles are subsumed under donor-driven agendas.Footnote 68 In other words, this exclusion highlights how liberal peacebuilding frameworks systematically erase or instrumentalize existing grassroots feminist and queer struggles.Footnote 69
By applying violence regimes and queer theory, we reveal the violent and deeply gendered and sexualized underpinnings of liberal intervention and the kind of violent peace that it pursues, despite the rhetorical promises of gender and sexual equality, inclusion and diversity. They allow us to question how interventionist logics obscure power, legitimize violence, and reproduce hierarchies through discourses of protection and rescue. Recognizing the contradictions and exclusions inherent in these processes is essential to challenging their normalization, as we demonstrate through the case of Bacha Bazi.
Fighting terrorists, saving women, and sacrificing boys
Gendered and sexualized power relations equipped liberal peace interventions with legitimizing narratives that depicted Afghan men as terrorists, deviants, or abusive patriarchs; Afghan women as helpless victims in need of Western saviours; and Afghan boys as passive victims of sexual abuse. This gendered mapping enabled liberal peacebuilding to operate through a racialized moral order in which masculinity, femininity, and sexuality became instruments of political justification. This section unpacks how Afghan men, women, and boys became entangled in liberal racialized and sexualized discourses, and how these entanglements reveal the operation of a broader violence regime privileging Western epistemologies while silencing complex local histories.
Pathologizing Afghan masculinity
Afghan men and their sexualities are associated with ‘all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body; homosexuality, incest, paedophilia, madness, and disease’.Footnote 70 In the early 2000s, Western media, photography, and scholarship amplified such representations. Photographs taken by Thomas Dworzak in 2001 depicted Afghan men in colourful clothing with kohl applied to their eyes, framing their appearance as evidence of ‘queerness’ and a ‘failure’ of Afghan masculinities.Footnote 71 Western news agencies sensationalized homosocial practices, interpreting public male affection through frameworks of sexual deviance or coercion.Footnote 72 Media coverage in the liberal West during the post-2001 intervention period highlighted the discomfort of foreign troops in Afghanistan with the social and sexual practices of Afghan men, particularly their public displays of affection towards each other and young boys. In a patriarchal spectacle that reinforced the superiority of certain patriarchies, US forces were portrayed as morally conflicted yet heroic, fighting not only for their own country’s security but also for the freedom of the Afghan people, while Afghan men were depicted as engaging in practices perceived as perverse and unmanly.Footnote 73 The US military even commissioned an academic research project on Afghan sexuality, resulting in the Human Terrain Report in 2009, which became a significant tool in training soldiers from the liberal West about the perceived ‘deviant’ practices of the ‘Other’.Footnote 74 This dynamic should not be read as establishing a hierarchy of suffering, as lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women are also profoundly pathologized, albeit through distinct gendered and sexualized narratives that mark their bodies as deviant and in need of regulation.
Through these means, liberal intervention in Afghanistan constituted a violence regime, committing epistemic violence by producing specific knowledge about Afghan men, their masculinities and sexualities. Military spaces construct masculinity around proving manhood through the ability to fight and protect political and social entities. ‘Real men’ are defined as those who participate in such violence, while those who refuse are cast as less manly, with masculinity used rhetorically to delegitimize alternative identities. Hence, these representations relied on binary constructions of ‘bestial’ versus heroic and ‘uncivilized’ versus ‘civilized’ masculinities associated with hegemonic masculinity.Footnote 75 Through these binaries, masculinity became a political standard through which legitimate security and authority were defined. Representations of Afghan men as embodying a violent, backward, or ‘failed’ masculinity not only differentiated them from the liberal masculine ideal but also helped legitimize military intervention and the project of remaking Afghan society.
Masculinities in Afghanistan are far more fluid and contextually negotiated than liberal depictions suggest. As Myrttinen, Khattab, and Naujoks note, masculinities should not be treated as fixed categories.Footnote 76 Hegemonic masculinity is not exclusive to Western actors; it operates among occupiers, insurgents, and state elites alike. Importantly, the discourse of rescuing and safeguarding women is not uniquely Western but forms part of a broader patriarchal logic of manhood. Afghan masculinities are shaped by prolonged war, economic precarity, and insecurity, where men are expected to provide nafaqah – material support and livelihood – for their families.Footnote 77 Manhood is closely tied to honour (nang/namus), protection, and the defence of women, family, and homeland.Footnote 78 Providing security, both privately and publicly, becomes a moral obligation. Thus, the promise to protect women is central to Afghan masculine identity, even if it is mobilized differently within local and liberal interventionist frameworks.Footnote 79
The Afghan boy: victim, deviant, symbol of power
Perhaps the most unsettling and least understood figure in this gendered landscape is the Afghan boy frequently associated with Bacha Bazi practice. Western discourse has framed this practice as evidence of Afghan cultural depravity and failed masculinity. Afghan men have been labelled ‘queer paedophiles’, and Bacha Bazi has been stripped away from its historical, socio-economic, and political dimensions.Footnote 80
Boys in Bacha Bazi often come from marginalized and impoverished backgrounds. While some are forcibly taken from their families and trafficked, others are sold by their families who are struggling with extreme poverty and precarity, in exchange for necessities such as food, medication, clothing, and money.Footnote 81 Some boys participate in Bacha Bazi voluntarily, driven by the need to financially support their families or themselves.Footnote 82 Afghan families offer their sons to, or Afghan boys become bacha for, local or regional strongmen, government officials, or military leaders for protection during conflict.Footnote 83
These dynamics reveal queer agency by challenging portrayals of queer individuals as passive victims, instead emphasizing how they actively navigate violent circumstances shaped by economic precarity, security needs, and survival imperatives. As Munhazim argues in relation to queer Afghan Muslims, queer life in conditions of war involves negotiation across multiple sites of danger rather than clear binaries of oppression and liberation.Footnote 84 Serrano-Amaya similarly emphasizes that queer lives in violent contexts are sustained through strategic navigation of visibility, silence, identity, and risk, rather than through linear trajectories of victimhood or rescue.Footnote 85 In the context of boys in Bacha Bazi, participation may at times be a strategic decision driven by the need for protection, food, or financial security, rather than a simple condition of victimhood. Such strategies should not be read as moral or political failures, but as forms of resistance and survival enacted within severely constrained circumstances.Footnote 86
However, these underlying factors and agency driving the practice of Bacha Bazi are often overlooked within the narrative shaped by the liberal peace interventionist order. One of the dominant narratives on Bacha Bazi is linked to the homosocialization of Afghan men, who have been socialized in exclusively male environments due to the exclusion of women from public spaces.Footnote 87 This portrays Afghan men both as excessively oppressive for denying women autonomy in public spaces, and as embodying ‘failed masculinity’ by being unable to satisfy their sexual needs through women, resorting instead to vulnerable, marginalized groups. This duality merges heteronormative and homonormative discourses, generating both homophobic and sexist attitudes. As queer theory highlights, such dualities coexist, simultaneously reinforcing and challenging patriarchal structures.Footnote 88 Within this view, the sexual exploitation of women is acceptable under heteronormative frameworks, reinforcing the notion that their primary role is to serve male pleasure. This discourse also rejects the possibility of genuine same-sex desire among Afghan men, instead claiming that, due to limited ‘access to women’, men turn to other men and boys out of desperation.Footnote 89
Another narrative on Bacha Bazi is constructed on the notion of cultural violence, attributing the practice to inherent flaws within Afghan culture. The Human Terrain Report claims that paedophilic abuse and sodomy are accepted by the Afghan community and suggests that nearly half of Afghan men were abused as children and subsequently engage in paedophilic behaviours themselves.Footnote 90 Some scholars further associate this cultural violence with Afghanistan’s perpetually war-torn environment, arguing that practices like Bacha Bazi are a consequence of the country’s chaotic and anarchic state, a space where violence is pervasive and unchecked.Footnote 91 In these settings, it is suggested that the victimization inherent in Bacha Bazi gives these boys the desire to reclaim a sense of manliness, power, and dignity through later acts of violence of their own, perpetuating a cycle of terrorist masculinities.Footnote 92 As a result, these practices are framed as part of a broader narrative of ‘cultural paedophilia’ that ultimately contributes to ‘cultural terrorism’, uprooting it from Afghanistan’s broader socio-cultural-economic and political histories. None of our interviewees corroborated these generalized claims; instead, several described the practice as tied to specific structural conditions such as poverty, patronage, and impunity rather than a diffuse cultural pathology. As discussed later in the article, these accounts complicate culturalized explanations of Bacha Bazi by foregrounding the political, economic, and social conditions through which the practice is sustained.
Bacha Bazi has a long historical presence which is far more complex than its contemporary manifestation as the sexual abuse of young boys, as lamented in these dominant narratives of the liberal West. Historically, intergenerational same-sex relationships between bacha and older men (Bachah-bāz) were primarily centred on the mentorship, education, and care of the young pupil by his master. These relationships aimed to ensure that the boy received a solid education and positive prospects, while also facilitating the transmission of the arts and sciences of civilization from one generation to the next.Footnote 93 Same-sex desire was not necessarily organized through modern identity categories; men could admire the beauty of amrads (beardless youths) without such admiration defining a fixed sexual identity.Footnote 94 As Manchanda notes, Western hetero/homo binaries – such as ‘straight’, ‘gay’, or ‘lesbian’ – do not fully capture the relational and historically contingent understandings of same-sex intimacy in this context.Footnote 95 Acknowledging these histories, however, must not lead to romanticizing them. Significant age differentials, power asymmetries, and social hierarchies shaped these relationships, and coercion and exploitation could and did occur. Moreover, not all bachas, nor the men involved in such practices, identify as sexual or gender minorities; these practices have historically been structured through age, status, aesthetics, and patronage rather than fixed sexual identities as conceptualized in Western frameworks.
Since the period of Soviet invasion, the practice has altered drastically. The occupation and subsequent civil war among mujahideen factions devastated Afghanistan’s infrastructure, displaced millions of people, and produced severe economic collapse and lawlessness, conditions under which Bacha Bazi became increasingly linked to trafficking and abuse. Mujahideen commanders, who accumulated power, wealth, and weapons during the conflict, often kidnapped boys under the pretext of employing them as porters or ‘chai boys’, subjecting many to sexual enslavement. Ownership of boys became a visible marker of authority and masculine prestige, demarcating regional power.Footnote 96 In the documentary ‘Dancing Boys of Afghanistan’, a former Mujahideen commander in Takhar province shared: ‘I had a boy because every commander kept a bacha.Footnote 97 There was competition among the commanders, and without one, I couldn’t compete.’ In our own study, one research participant elaborated on the aspect of symbolic power:
General X [name omitted] kept Bacha Bazi boys with him until he died. People say he wasn’t interested in having sex with them; he kept them as a symbol of prestige. He took care of them, bought them nice clothes, and let them drive his fancy cars, but they had to obey his commands without delay. This was how he displayed his power to his rivals.
This account, corroborating the documentary testimony above, reveals Bacha Bazi as a symbolic technology of power embedded in patron–client relations. Maintaining dependants signified dominance, wealth, and elite authority, particularly in a context where decades of foreign intervention had eroded political and economic autonomy. Boys became living markers of masculine prestige within local political economies structured by loyalty, submission, and material exchange.
In spite of these different narratives and historical trajectories, Western representations of Bacha Bazi following the 2001 intervention frequently detached the practice from its complex historical and sociocultural contexts. As Khan observes, Western media accounts often relied on terms such as ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, ‘trophy boys’, and ‘dancing boys’, presenting the practice through Western binaries of sexuality and within narratives of regional strongmen, the Taliban, religious fundamentalism, and Afghan traditionality.Footnote 98 Such representations, we argue, reproduced familiar racialized, sexualized, and Orientalist constructions of Afghanistan that could, in turn, reinforce the broader legitimating narratives of liberal intervention. This simplifies the complex dynamics involved in the ‘problem’ and gives control to the violence regime to manipulate the story, intervention, and outcomes according to its own interest.Footnote 99 As Abdi sums up the liberal West’s de-historicization and simplification strategies: ‘White men saving brown women and brown boys from brown men was imagined and “fighting paedophilia” was an even more convincing argument in selling the Afghan war to targeted audiences than fighting “misogyny”.’Footnote 100 It is all part of the structural grammar of intervention, through which the liberal peace order enacts its violence, obscures its complicities, and sustains its legitimacy.
Dancing to the tunes of peacebuilders
Dominant narratives on Bacha Bazi claim that the practice forces gender reversal in boys, disrupting traditional gender roles and identities.Footnote 101 Borile argues that the boy becomes feminized in the eyes of the community, deprived of his ‘natural sexual identity’ through enforced performance of femininity. Such claims stem from cisnormative and homophobic assumptions – that boys are naturally men, and that performing femininity inherently alters their gender and sexuality. The practice is thus framed as perverse, destroying boys’ manhood and conditioning boys into inescapable deviance.Footnote 102
However, Afghan cultural history reveals a more fluid understanding of gender. Supposedly feminine adjectives have long described both men and women, reflecting shared ideals of beauty rather than undermining masculinity.Footnote 103 Bachas often wear female clothing and makeup but retain male hairstyles, presenting sexual ambiguity.Footnote 104 Western narratives, shaped by hetero- and cisnormativity, obscure these complexities and reproduce perceptions of Afghan culture as perverse, positioning these boys solely as victims in need of rescue. They are stripped of agency, seen merely as sexual objects robbed of manhood. Yet, as noted earlier, some sought protection under benevolent commanders or engaged in Bacha Bazi as a survival strategy, forming support networks and creating ways to endure their circumstances.
Bacha Bazi is linked by some to the deterioration of women’s rights in Afghanistan, where the prevailing societal view is that ‘women are for children, and boys are for pleasure’.Footnote 105 It is argued that because of Bacha Bazi, men lose their interest in women, thus depriving the women of love and affection, reducing their role to mere caretakers or commodities.Footnote 106 This even leads to claims that Afghan men do not have capacity for love but only for violent sexual desire.Footnote 107 Such narratives present sexual differences as pathology, and frame Afghan society as uniquely debased. Ironically, while criticizing gender oppression, these depictions often reinforce the very heteronormative assumptions they claim to challenge, reducing sexuality to rigid binaries and reproducing sexist and homophobic logics.
On the ground, however, we found the political landscape to be less moralized and more predatory. As one of our research participants shared: ‘In the end, it didn’t matter who came to power – they all exploited the vulnerable. It was a situation where criminals, the powerful, and the warlords were secure, but the public was not.’ This remark is consistent with Sedra’s account of Afghanistan’s political economy, in which counter-insurgency priorities systematically privileged pragmatic alliances with predatory actors over rights protections regardless of which faction held power.Footnote 108
The operations of this violence regime crystallized as sexualized, racialized, and gendered discourses for ‘othering’ Afghan men were used to legitimize liberal peace interventions. A violence regime regulates the production, manifestation, and interconnectedness of violence. By framing Bacha Bazi as a product of Afghan culture marked by violence and perversity, leading to gender reversal for boys and further deterioration in the position of women in society, scholars of the post-2001 period often call on international bodies to intervene to ‘rescue’ Afghan boys from Afghan men. Jones advocates using the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine to intervene in Afghanistan.Footnote 109 The UN Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict issued formal conclusions condemning the practice of Bacha Bazi and called on the Afghan government to take immediate and specific actions to end and prevent this practice.Footnote 110 Although Bacha Bazi was officially prohibited in 2017 under Afghanistan’s revised anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling laws, as well as the 2018 amended Penal Code, perpetrators, including strongmen, military officials, and politicians, evade prosecution through bribery and connections with law enforcement.Footnote 111 Scholars argue that when states are unwilling or unable to protect their citizens, the broader international community must intervene by invoking the responsibility to protect, potentially leading to political and economic sanctions or military intervention.Footnote 112 Others reference international legal frameworks such as the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, which prohibit sexual violence against civilians, as well as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which Afghanistan has ratified, to advocate for US intervention.Footnote 113 It is worth noting that when these calls for rescue were made, there was already a military presence in Afghanistan, yet it did not challenge the practice of Bacha Bazi, even though the relevant standard legal frameworks were in place. As one interviewee lamented, after defeating the Taliban, ‘the Northern alliance became the superpower in Afghanistan and misused their power’. Calls for intervention thus coexisted with entrenched impunity. This highlights the complexity of military involvement, where the intended protection may not align with the reality on the ground, and where deeper, systemic issues are ignored in favour of expanded intervention. One of the research participants reflected:
Under the new culture of freedom introduced by the post-2001 government – as opposed to the Taliban’s strict ban on TV and music – young boys yearning for freedom wanted to become like characters in Indian and Turkish TV shows. This raised their expectations for themselves and their desire to be seen as ‘someone.’ However, their impoverished parents were unable to fulfil their desires, even as buying a TV became everyone’s dream. Children frequented the neighbourhood just to catch glimpses of other people watching TV. As families tried to rebuild dreams shattered by war, they were compelled to start small economic activities, like making homemade food. Since women were not allowed to go out to work, children took on the role of selling goods and begging on the streets. They became vulnerable to Bacha Bazi masters, who preyed on them and had the means to fulfil their desires.
This account substantiates the structural dynamics identified by Frost and Abdi: poverty and patronage networks, rather than cultural pathology, function as the primary mechanisms of vulnerability to exploitation.Footnote 114 Western representations of Afghanistan not only obscured these structural conditions, including poverty, aspiration, and patronage networks that shaped everyday vulnerabilities, but this disengagement also extended to reported incidents of Bacha Bazi: US soldiers who raised concerns were instructed not to intervene, as the practice was treated as a matter of local culture.Footnote 115 Reports emphasized the US forces’ inability to act, highlighting foreign forces’ perceived incapacity to challenge ingrained cultural violence.Footnote 116 This policy was framed as avoiding the imposition of Western values.Footnote 117 Yet this framing performs its own kind of violence: by designating Bacha Bazi as an untouchable cultural matter rather than a political or legal harm, the policy of non-intervention actively withdraws these boys from the protection it elsewhere claims to extend.Footnote 118 Non-intervention becomes not a passive absence of response but a decision that reclassifies certain bodies as outside the bounds of grievability altogether.
This logic extended beyond Bacha Bazi. As Scanlon notes in relation to the WPS agenda, US military responses to gender reform often invoked cultural relativism: ‘You can’t push gender integration on this culture’.Footnote 119 Despite formally linking gender equality to peacebuilding, the WPS agenda struggled to translate theory into practice, as reflected in Afghan women’s limited participation in high-level state-building and peace processes and the persistent subordination of their rights to militarized security priorities.Footnote 120 This limitation was not incidental but consistent with the pattern already observed in relation to Bacha Bazi: gendered harms, whether affecting boys or women, were treated as negotiable whenever they conflicted with security or stabilization objectives. Although liberal peace frameworks formally foreground agendas such as WPS, these commitments proved similarly expendable in diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, where women’s participation and gender rights were repeatedly affirmed in principle but sidelined in practice as negotiations prioritized stabilization and geopolitical bargaining.Footnote 121 Thus, while the invasion was partly justified in the name of protection, gendered power structures were simultaneously treated as untouchable cultural matters, revealing a broader pattern in liberal peace interventions of mobilizing gender rhetorically while leaving patriarchal relations intact.
The Leahy Law, adopted in 1997 by the US Congress, prohibits financial assistance or training to foreign military forces implicated in human rights violations.Footnote 122 However, when the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund was created in 2005, it included a clause stating that funds ‘shall be available to the Secretary of Defense, notwithstanding any other provision of law’.Footnote 123 Despite evidence of child abuse and trafficking among Afghan forces, the Department of Defense invoked the clause to continue support. This reveals a stark contradiction: the US justified invasion partly on the grounds of promoting women’s rights and ending oppressive practices, yet it refrained from addressing it, calling it cultural. This inconsistency exposes a selective approach, where women’s plight prompted intervention, but boys’ abuse was ignored.Footnote 124 Appeals to ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ in such contexts reflect what feminist scholars describe as patriarchal bargains, where gender rights are framed as negotiable in the name of security, tradition, or political stability, even though culture itself is a contested and power-laden terrain.Footnote 125
The collateral body: Bacha unseen, unspoken, unmourned
The US policy of non-intervention in Bacha Bazi directly reflects the political economy of liberal peacebuilding, where counter-insurgency priorities and pragmatic warlord alliances routinely superseded human rights imperatives.Footnote 126 Because Bacha Bazi involved and benefited nearly all internal actors engaged in the conflict, external powers adopted a stance of structural indifference.Footnote 127 Each major stakeholder, whether through direct involvement, institutional protection, or diplomatic silence, sustained the practice. One research participant described how rapid, unmonitored capital flows during the intervention reshaped local dynamics:
In northern Afghanistan, some people became extremely rich almost overnight, and they did not know how to spend their money. They started buying horses for buzkashi, keeping dogs for fighting, and engaging in other un-Islamic activities such as Bacha Bazi and gambling.
Far from remaining a localized tradition, Bacha Bazi became deeply entangled with the broader informal economy fostered by state fragmentation. As one interviewee explained:
Some people make videos of Bacha Bazi parties and sell them in the market. Even those who can’t afford to keep a boy can profit from circulating the recordings.
What was once framed through historical patronage was thus commodified into indirect consumption within market networks. This trajectory demonstrates how liberal intervention does not merely encounter local traditions, but actively accelerates the capitalist-patriarchal monetization of vulnerable bodies.Footnote 128
This marketization stands in stark contrast to the Taliban’s historical trajectory. During their first regime in the 1990s, the Taliban officially banned Bacha Bazi, using public punishments to signal Islamic order. By suppressing violent rivalries among mujahideen commanders over dancing boys, the Taliban secured significant community backing.Footnote 129 However, following the 2001 US invasion and the re-establishment of former regional strongmen within government institutions, the practice resurged openly, leading to a sharp spike in child trafficking and abuse.Footnote 130
Simultaneously, the Taliban strategically weaponized Bacha Bazi to undermine state institutions. By infiltrating police units using coerced boys, the Taliban gathered intelligence and launched insider attacks.Footnote 131 In several cases, abused boys actively joined the insurgency to seek retribution against police captors.Footnote 132 The security apparatus was further compromised by private military contractors operating alongside US forces; exempt from military codes and operating without civilian oversight, these contractors frequently participated in or enabled human rights violations.Footnote 133
These dynamics illuminate the central paradox of ‘humanitarian militarism’.Footnote 134 Under the banner of establishing liberal peace, international forces provided extensive funding, equipment, and legitimacy to security actors who actively perpetrated child exploitation.Footnote 135 As one participant recalled:
In the eyes of the ordinary Afghan community, ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force] was protecting Bacha Bazi perpetrators. In northern Afghanistan, international troops were providing security to Bacha Bazi owners and the militia to do whatever they wanted to do.
This account is independently corroborated by US Department of State reports which documented widespread abuse perpetrated directly by state security organs including the Afghan National Army, National Police, and Local Police.Footnote 136 Despite this documented evidence, no comparable mechanism existed to formally register these boys as victims of human rights violations or to hold perpetrators to account; their abuse was recorded but never recognized. Provincial officials and commanders operated with complete impunity, using military authority to shield their patronage.Footnote 137 This structural complicity illustrates how gendered and sexualized subjects are selectively included or excluded from liberal peace frameworks, invoked rhetorically as victims in need of rescue, yet abandoned in practice, their suffering left officially unmarked.Footnote 138
This selective vision was reinforced by the intervention’s hybrid security architecture. Blending counterterrorism with state-building created profound contradictions: arming predatory commanders while promoting democratic reforms, and funding demobilization while re-arming local defence forces.Footnote 139 Security Sector Reform prioritized narrow ‘train-and-equip’ programmes over human rights accountability.Footnote 140 As one participant observed, ‘fighting Bacha Bazi was never a political priority’. Another interviewee elaborated on this policy silence:
Perhaps they had priorities other than fighting a cultural practice… Fighting immorality isn’t the task of the government or a political programme, it is the job of religious leaders and scholars.
By framing systematic child abuse as a matter of private morality or local tradition rather than a severe human rights violation, those behind the interventions effectively outsourced state responsibility. Formal legal institutions were consistently overridden by informal politico-military patronage networks.Footnote 141 International actors frequently engaged in ‘patriarchal bargains’, exchanging political cover and financial support for tactical anti-Taliban assistance.Footnote 142 One interviewee highlighted how this extended to state-embedded criminality:
The main border crossings used for smuggling opium are secured by former warlords who have now been integrated into the government. For example, the Ishkashim and Shighnan border posts … are both controlled by warlords. Wahid Khan, the commander of the Badakhshan border police, is widely known to be a drug kingpin. He uses government vehicles to transport drugs to the border, and no one stops him.
In the domain of Bacha Bazi, a human rights activist similarly noted:
It was important for Western forces to allow the Mujahideen to control certain aspects of governance or to turn a blind eye to their predatory conduct as they continually bargained for more power within the transitional government to avoid becoming a destabilizing force in Afghanistan again.
Similarly, another interviewee explained:
General Y [name omitted] organized a Bacha Bazi party in Badakhshan province in 2018. Because of his connections with a prominent political leader [name omitted], the police could not arrest him; they could only disrupt his Bacha Bazi party.
Even where abuse was directly witnessed, the institutional response was to disperse the scene, not to name the harm or the boys within it. These strategic compromises entrenched institutional impunity. For many commanders, access to young boys was so vital to their status that requiring them to give up the practice threatened their alignment with the state; some officers chose to abandon their posts rather than sever these ties.Footnote 143 Armed commanders enjoyed impunity precisely because they were valued counter-insurgency partners.Footnote 144 References to a former mujahideen commander, who went on to head a local administrative body, illustrate this dynamic:
General X [name omitted] was infamous throughout Badakhshan for Bacha Bazi and lawbreaking. Yet when ISAF and PRT [the Provincial Reconstruction Team] arrived in Badakhshan, they built a close relationship with him. He even received a monthly stipend from ISAF and the PRTs.
Another interviewee reinforced this observation:
Despite General X [name omitted]’s local notoriety for Bacha Bazi, the opium trade, and lawlessness across Badakhshan and Takhar provinces, ISAF forces built a close relationship with him to secure his support in keeping the region stable.
Across these cases of commodification, impunity, and patriarchal bargaining alike, a consistent pattern emerges: Bacha Bazi is documented, discussed, even quietly acknowledged, yet never formally counted as warranting redress. This pragmatic tolerance exposes how commitments to rights were routinely subordinated under liberal peace frameworks to geopolitical bargaining.Footnote 145 These empirical realities directly reflect Butler’s interrogation of the selective frames of war: ‘Whose lives count as lives?’ and ‘what makes for a grievable life?’.Footnote 146 Butler’s concept of precarity describes the differential distribution of protection and neglect, wherein specific populations are implicitly marked as unmournable. Within the discursive economy of the intervention, victims of Bacha Bazi could not be recognized as grievable subjects. Granting these boys official recognition as victims of human rights violations would have required confronting the very military and political allies on whom the counter-insurgency depended, thereby contributing to the structural obscuring of their suffering. This reveals a broader contradiction: Afghan masculinities, discursively constructed by liberal powers as requiring reform, were simultaneously co-opted as indispensable operational partners in the counter-insurgency. Trapped between state-sanctioned impunity and international silence, the bodies of the Bacha Bazi boys existed in a liminal state: structurally present as collateral casualties of state-building, yet entirely absent from frameworks of international justice and redress.Footnote 147
Conclusion
Our study demonstrates that liberal interventions for liberal peace function as a violence regime. As the case of Afghanistan reveals, these interventions do not aim to end violence; rather, they harness and govern it to justify their presence, maintain hierarchical power structures, and advance strategic interests – not least in relation to gender and sexual violence. Violence is not eradicated but managed, reinforcing the necessity and moral superiority of the liberal peace order. As illustrated through the case of Bacha Bazi, gendered and sexualized power relations, alongside racialized bodies, are instrumentalized, cast simultaneously as victims needing rescue, and as deviants who can be expendable. In this context, gender and sexuality become both the justification for intervention and the logic guiding its implementation. Despite its emancipatory claims, liberal peace does not challenge patriarchal norms but rather legitimizes certain patriarchies while controlling discourse over which practices are acceptable. Liberal peace thus reproduces gender hierarchies as structural features of political life that shape both meaning and identity.Footnote 148 These interventions foster impunity and escalate violence, as seen in the increased exploitation of boys in Bacha Bazi, which in turn contributed to local disillusionment vis-à-vis foreign forces and support for the Taliban.Footnote 149
When the Taliban regained power in 2021, the dynamics shifted, but the precarity of LGBTQI+ individuals and those involved in Bacha Bazi remained.Footnote 150 The Taliban imposed harsh restrictions, banning beardless youth from public life and military roles to avoid association with the practice. This extended their control from female bodies to male bodies. As Abdi notes, by removing both women and beardless boys, the Taliban sought to discipline and homogenize male-only spaces.Footnote 151 Yet, this created new consequences: beardless youth became hyper-visible and increasingly fetishized, perpetuating the very violence the ban purported to end. In this framework, liberal reasoning strips agency from those it claims to protect, depoliticizes intervention, and conceals the structural power it enacts. It frames violence management as a moral imperative of the liberal West, while sustaining the conditions for that violence.
Acknowledgement
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all research participants for their willingness to share their perspectives and engage in discussions on a subject that remains widely regarded as taboo. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their thoughtful and detailed feedback, which significantly strengthened the quality and clarity of this article.
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