Winner of the 2024 Robert H. Ferrell Award

On 24 December 1979, Soviet armed forces entered Afghanistan, beginning an occupation that would last almost a decade and creating a political crisis that shook the world. To many observers, the Soviet invasion showed the lengths to which one of the world's superpowers would go to vie for supremacy in the global Cold War. The Soviet war, and parallel covert American aid to Afghan resistance fighters, would come to be a defining event of international politics in the final years of the Cold War, lingering far beyond the Soviet Union's own demise. Yet Cold War competition is only a small part of the story. Soviet troops entered a country already at war with itself. A century of debates within Afghanistan over the nature of modern nationhood culminated in a 1978 coup in which self-described Afghan communists pledged to fundamentally reshape Afghanistan. Instead what broke out was a civil war in which Afghans asserted competing models of Afghan statehood. Afghan socialists and Islamists came to the fore of this conflict in the 1980s, thanks in part to Soviet and American involvement, but they represented a broader movement for local articulations of social and political modernity that did not derive from foreign models. Afghans, in conversation with foreigners, set many of the parameters of the conflict. This sweeping history moves between centres of state in Kabul, Moscow, Islamabad, and Washington, the halls of global governance in Geneva and New York, resistance hubs in Peshawar and Panjshir, and refugee camps scattered across Pakistan's borderlands to tell a story that is much more expansive than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - a global history of a moment of crisis not just for Afghanistan or the Cold War but international relations and the postcolonial state.

The Defiant Border explores the end of British rule in northwest South Asia, rethinking the development of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas from the late colonial period into the mid-twentieth century. It examines British, American, Pakistani, Afghan, and Indian officials’ efforts to subdue local Pashtun tribal groupings, and demonstrates how colonial-era practices and socio-political categories have continued to shape the region – not only subjecting it to widespread, state-led violence but also concretizing understanding of Pashtuns as “tribal.” The book shows, on one hand, how the supposedly “tribal” and assumed “backward” nature of Pashtun politics and society allowed colonial and postcolonial officials to justify invasive, frequently brutal, policies against this population, while, on the other, highlighting ways that local Pashtun leaders used the “tribe” and its exclusion from first colonial Indian then Pakistani society and governance to retain extraordinary degrees of autonomy in a world increasingly dominated by sovereign nation-states. The book uncovers the interactions between local, national, regional, and international actors and policy concerns. It explores, for example, how a seemingly obscure ethnonationalist movement in the Pakistani borderlands reshaped American Cold War policy towards South Asia and how Afghan and Pakistani competition over this border community led to continued justifications for violence as the main form of frontier governance. Overall, the book demonstrates the crucial role that peripheral, potentially “anti-state” actors can play in influencing processes of decolonization and postcolonial state-building, with ongoing ramifications for the current day.

Edited volumes

  • Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence. Only by understanding its past entanglements with the world can we understand South Asia’s increasing global importance today.

  • The Cold War and decolonization transformed the twentieth century world. This volume brings together an international line-up of experts to explore how these transformations took place and expand on some of the latest threads of analysis to help inform our understanding of the links between the two phenomena. The book begins by exploring ideas of modernity, development, and economics as Cold War and postcolonial projects and goes on to look at the era's intellectual history and investigate how emerging forms of identity fought for supremacy. Finally, the contributors question ideas of sovereignty and state control that move beyond traditional Cold War narratives. Decolonization and the Cold War emphasizes new approaches by drawing on various methodologies, regions, themes, and interdisciplinary work, to shed new light on two topics that are increasingly important to historians of the twentieth century.