Speaker: Nivi Manchanda is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her book Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press 2020) was awarded the LHM Ling First Outstanding Book Award by the British International Studies Association in 2021. Her new project is an intellectual history of border and bordering, focusing particularly on questions of race, capitalism, and gender. This talk will track commonplace 'Orientalist' tropes that have been used to make sense of Afghanistan to argue that representations of Afghanistan as 'backward', 'tribal' and 'violent' were instrumentalised for the purposes of invasion. These representations are unpacked in some detail to show how colonial stereotypes of Afghanistan continue to be repurposed today in the service of Western imperialism. |