Empire’s h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan

Abstract

This article thinks theory otherwise by searching for what is missing, silent and yet highly productive and constitutive of present realities. Looking at Afghanistan and Egypt, the authors show how imperial legacies and capitalist futurities are rendered invisible by dominant social theories, and why it matters that we think beyond an empiricist sociology in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the authors explore the ways in which portrayals of the country as retrogressive elide the colonial violence that has ensured the very backwardness that is now considered Afghanistan’s enduring characteristic. Specifically, using the example of the institutionalisation of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), they ask what alternative narratives might emerge if we take empire’s ghosts seriously on their own terms? In Egypt, the authors look at the ways in which Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anticolonial project continues to haunt present-day Egyptian political, social and economic life. In particular, they ask how anticolonial nationalism and its promises produced lingering after-effects, and how we can understand these through the figure of the ‘spectre’. The article asks what it would mean to produce social theory through (re)visiting sites of resistance, violence and contestation, proposing haunting as a means through which to understand and analyse political, social and economic change in the Middle East.

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“…Busbridge examines Lifta as a "haunted geography," in which settler colonial attempts to write nations are confronted by the underlying histories that remain and linger, ghosts of the past of Palestinian claims to land, seen in the underlying graffiti, stories that remain present, and recognition and memory of Palestinians, imagining a reconciliatory "futuring" in the context of the Nakba (Busbridge, 2015, p. 469). Manchanda and Salem (2020) in their case studies of Afghanistan and Egypt, examine colonial violence and anticolonial developmentalist projects, which leave a lingering memory that is omnipresent in a populace. In revisiting sites of resistance, violence, and contestation, the authors propose haunting as a means of understanding political, social, and economic change in the Middle East, the ways in which spectres of colonial administration and anticolonial nationalism remain relevant in space and nationality (Manchanda & Salem, 2020, p. 243).…”