The Persistence of Precarious Sovereignty in the Post 9/11 Era

• In Event: Development and Conflict in the Era of American Withdrawal

Abstract

The attacks on September 11, 2001 catapulted Afghanistan into the center of the American geopolitical imaginary, where it would become the object of paradoxically intertwined fantasies – fantasies of vengeance and liberation. This territory held within it an enemy to be vanquished, women to be saved, tribes to be tamed, and a nation to be freed (Manchanda 2020). The United States and its allies bestowed upon themselves the right to pursue (and, as importantly, to abandon) all of these imperatives in their first campaign in the “global war on terror.” By the end of 2001, the Taliban regime had fallen, and Hamid Karzai assumed leadership of an Interim Government in Kabul, co-constituted by Afghan victors and their new foreign patrons (Mukhopadhyay 2014). The Karzai regime, owing its existence as the internationally-recognized government of Afghanistan to the War on Terror, commenced a new chapter of Afghan state formation all the while unable to claim control over the basic fundaments of state power – coercion, capital, diplomacy, law, or politics. Such would be the parameters of this first attempt at state-building as counterterrorism.

Regimes born of this war would exist in the service of a mission that, at once, necessitated and constricted their sovereignty. Why construct such a “precarious” (Loori 2017) form of sovereignty? After all, the premise of post-2001 intervention stemmed from the notion that far-away ungoverned or ill-governed spaces had allowed shadowy terrorist networks to take hold and strike at the heart of the Western world. State strength represented the antidote to extremism (Fukuyama 2004). Beyond the capacity to rule, a near consensus across Western policy and academic circles had emerged since the end of the Cold War that the complexion of “post-conflict” governance mattered (Zakaria 1997; Ottaway 2003; Paris 2004).

Precarious sovereignty, I will contend, served as a new modality of American empire that satisfied the contradictory (but, in fact, conjoined) quests for revenge and beneficence. The War on Terror renewed and reconfigured a set of imperial logics and devices that hinged on a distinct kind of sovereignty. This brand of imperialism has proved especially tricky to grapple with precisely because it combined profoundly oppressive technologies of violence with genuinely emancipatory practices. But, as Laura Stoler urged, if we release ourselves from “a myopic view of empire,” we can come to recognize “a far broader range of imperial forms” (Stoler 2016, 175-6). In this paper, I will construct a genealogy of precarious sovereignty in an effort to elaborate a concept foundational to 21st century state-building and democracy promotion. Drawing on scholarship on the long-standing ties between liberalism and empire (Mehta 1997; Anghie 2005; Mantena 2010; Simpson 2014; Bell 2016) I will surface those threads that ran through historical forms of empire, settler colonialism, Cold War era unconventional warfare, and post-Cold War democracy promotion into the post-9/11 era.

With respect to the contemporary moment, I will center the Afghan case as paradigmatic but also demonstrate that the impulse to sustain imperial forms of influence has survived and, in fact, transcended the widely recognized failures in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I will draw on the Syrian case of Western support for the so-called moderate opposition (Mukhopadhyay and Howe, 2023) to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical continuities that bear note and may well find themselves resurfacing in a site like post-war Gaza. In effect, I will argue that Western publics, as well as those serving in governments and militaries, have come to embrace a version of imperialism that evokes all of its potency while masking its cruelty and cost. An imperialism, in other words, that can be both vengeful and freeing through the production of precarious forms of sovereignty.

Author

• Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Johns Hopkins University SAIS