American Cold War modernism served state interests during the cultural Cold War. The United States government used modernism in art, literature, music, and print to highlight American advancements and respect for individual expressions in a free society. Literary modernism was thus employed to undermine a communist campaign seen as totalitarian, outdated, and void of any room for individual expression. The main targets of American modernism were Western intellectuals who generally looked down on American culture. Haddadian-Moghaddam compares and contrasts early American Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives in Iran and Afghanistan, including both book programs and motion pictures. These two neighboring countries have been historically related to each other in terms of religion (Shi‘i Islam for the majority of the population in Iran and Sunni Islam in Afghanistan) and languages (Persian, as one of the major languages spoken in Iran, and Dari, or Afghani Persian, and Pashto in Afghanistan). The chapter takes up scholarship on Cold War modernism and the United States Information Agency Book Translation Program’s operations in Afghanistan and Iran.

This chapter explores Aurangzeb’s princely career between his birth in 1618 and his accession to the Mughal throne in 1658. In it, close attention is paid to the decades-long efforts by Prince Aurangzeb to position himself for a successful bid to become the next Mughal emperor. This chapter examines the slow growth of Aurangzeb’s personal household, his networks of support, his efforts to gain military and administrative experience, his attempts to raise money for himself, and his campaign to build his own public image. This chapter draws heavily on his personal letters, a source that has been infrequently used by other historians because it comprises two massive volumes and is in highly stylized Persian.

In Chapter 4, we examine two empirical cases – Afghanistan and Mauritania – to show how our argument explains variation in the intractability of Islamist civil wars. Both countries were targets and recruitment grounds for transnational Islamist armed groups, yet their conflicts followed strikingly different paths. Afghanistan experienced a decades-long war that ended in 2021, while Mauritania’s conflict was brief and ended by 2011. The Afghanistan war featured significant international involvement, with both the Taliban and the Afghan government receiving external support, which heightened uncertainty around capabilities and resolve. Afghanistan illustrates how external interventions can deepen intractability. In contrast, Mauritania adopted a strategy of localization. By refusing foreign military presence and avoiding participation in regional interventions, the government prevented the conflict from becoming internationalized. Tighter border control also limited the ability of jihadist networks to exploit local tensions. This insulated Mauritania from the broader transnational battle, which helps explain why the conflict ended relatively quickly.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the military responses that follow, stand as the defining events shaping war and society in twenty-first century U.S. culture. This chapter traces this history, beginning by placing the attacks and the events that followed in a broader historical context stretching back to the late 1970s before examining the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the evolution of military strategy, the impact of new technologies like drone warfare, the evolution of the all-volunteer force during prolonged conflict, and the physical and psychological consequences of war for servicemembers and their families. The chapter also addresses domestic responses to these conflicts, including the surveillance and detention of Arab and Muslim Americans, protest and resistance to the conflicts, and larger political shifts. This multidisciplinary approach to the past quarter century of domestic and foreign policy illuminates how the contours of American engagement with foreign policy, warfare, and the military have evolved and how the War on Terror remains the defining paradigm through which contemporary Americans contemplate the intersection of war and society.

Pakistan’s seventy-five-year economic history can be divided into three distinct periods. The first decade after 1947 was a period of low growth, but one in which a functioning state was set up from scratch and rapid industrialization occurred. The 1960–1990 period saw high economic growth but high costs, including the secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing (now Bangladesh), the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the ensuing civil war, which spilled over into Pakistan. Between 1990 and 2022, growth halved, primarily due to the continuing conflict in Afghanistan – this time with the US- led invasion after 9/11 – coupled with poor economic management in dealing with recurring balance-of-payments crisis and frequent recourse to the IMF. The key factors responsible for these changes are identified through ten turning points, which capture major events both internal and external and the ensuing structural changes, including in the composition of the ruling elite. Failure to undertake economic reforms was a key factor in Pakistan’s overall disappointing performance after a promising start.

In situations of aparadigmatic transitions, where formal transitional justice mechanisms do not exist, or may only partially exist, ‘victims’ are typically the most active drivers behind a range of intersecting justice struggles. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Kabul with war victims since 2008, this chapter underlines the importance of a bottom-up and victim-centred approach towards memorialisation and accountability efforts. This approach emphasises participation, agency and empowerment. In particular, it elaborates on the meaningfulness of methodologies used in the Theatre of the Oppressed to engage, raise awareness, and create participatory forums for war victims in Afghanistan from 2009 to August 2021. These methodologies offer various perspectives on understanding the protagonism of victims, and require us to embrace and recognise different approaches to engaging in the justice process.

This chapter analyzes liberal interventionism in post-9/11 Afghanistan using hierarchical intervention theory. It highlight the vital role of intervention frames in coordinating “team performance” in multilateral interventions. great power intervention choices. After 9/11, the US and the UK jointly framed the Taliban as a rogue regime, leading to a multilateral intervention for regime change and nation-building. Through qualitative frame analysis of over 160 Security Council debates, the chapter shows how these interventions evolved as conflict events "broke the primary intervention frame," new strategies. As initial intervention frames lost their resonance with domestic audiences after frame-breaking events, we show that these events created critical junctures, leading great power leaders to initiate frame shifts yielding new action scripts. Competing explanations – ideological ties, humanitarian concerns, resource competition, great power rivalry, and leadership traits – account for early intervention choices, but fail to explain later shifts. Hierarchical intervention theory offers the fullest explanation of liberal interventionism in Afghanistan by showing how evolving frames guided strategic and tactical adjustments mobilizing domestic and international support for these choices.

Why did the United States lose the war in Afghanistan? Only a repeated habit of decision-making explains consistent strategic miscalculation. Policymakers in every administration prioritized counterterrorism – a comparatively simple, easily defined, “realistic,” concrete mission. They subordinated broader, more ambiguous, harder-to-define, morally aspirational, long-term goals, such as counterinsurgency and nation building. Policymakers did so even though – as repeated strategy reviews showed – the Taliban and al-Qaida were linked; success in the war against either depended on success in both; and counterinsurgency and nation building were necessary, alongside counterterrorism operations, to achieve the larger goal of al-Qaida’s defeat. These policies became embedded in the US bureaucracy, ensuring the bureaucracy kept implementing bad strategy on autopilot even when policymakers and repeated strategy reviews highlighted the problem.

The subject of insurgency explores how and why armed groups confront the state, their political and ideological claims, their links to society – including the support they have and their recruitment practices – and their political and military tactics. Rebel governance explores the behavior of non-state armed insurgencies in the territories they control – or partially control – and their attempts to provide public services, gain the support of the population, recruit members, manage economic policy, and gain legitimacy. Counterinsurgency involves efforts by state actors – sometimes with international assistance – to challenge and defeat rebel groups by military and political means and reassert the authority of the state in areas where rebel groups have influence. This chapter explores the relationship between insurgency and civil war, and the main theories of why insurgencies emerge and grow, their endurance, and their impact. As a part of this, it considers the provision of “governance” by some rebel groups in the territories in which they have some control, the services they attempt to provide, and the objectives that motivate this on the part of rebel leaders. Based on this, the chapter then explores the lessons of “rebel governance” for counterinsurgency campaigns and for peacebuilding after conflict.