The Taliban’s Origins, Rise, and Return: Radicalism, Dependency, and Sovereignty in the Global South
Radicalism in the Global South: Inequality, Identity and Resistance, Springer Nature, ss.183-201, 2026
- Yayın Türü: Kitapta Bölüm / Araştırma Kitabı
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1007/978-3-032-19484-8_12
- Yayınevi: Springer Nature
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.183-201
- Van Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This chapter examines the Taliban’s emergence, governance practices, collapse, and return to power through a historical–structural lens grounded in Global South scholarship. It argues that Afghanistan’s political trajectory cannot be understood solely through religious radicalism or internal fragmentation; rather, it reflects enduring patterns of coercive centralization, colonial boundary-making, external intervention, and aid-driven dependency that have shaped state–society relations since the nineteenth century. By integrating insights from Shahrani, Escobar, Mignolo, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and feminist decolonial thinkers such as Abu-Lughod and Mohanty, the analysis highlights how epistemic asymmetries and imposed development models reproduced institutional fragility during the 2001–2021 state-building experiment. The study shows that externally engineered institutions—while formally modern—failed to secure local legitimacy, creating political vacuums in which the Taliban’s locally resonant claims to justice, order, and autonomy regained traction. The chapter contends that the Taliban’s return represents both a rupture and a continuity: a regression in rights and freedoms, yet also a manifestation of long-standing structural tensions that external intervention repeatedly failed to resolve. Afghanistan’s experience ultimately demonstrates the limits of imported governance templates and underscores the need to analyze political authority through historically grounded, context-specific frameworks rather than prescriptive universal models.