Traditional Borders and Transnational Identities: Borders, Conflicts and Afghan Society

This chapter argues that the withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan after twenty years and the subsequent Taliban takeover have raised myriad forms of debates among the scholars of International Relations. However, the landlocked country with numerous ethnic groups has been embroiled in geopolitical tussles long before the global War on Terror. To understand the complexities, one has to make a cautious analysis of the events while considering both internal and external dynamics. One of the highly overlooked areas is the composition of the Afghan borderlands that serve as frontiers of identities, cultures, faiths and spatial organisations of power and politics.