Research | My Site

Research Statement:

My research draws on and advances

Academic and popular work on Afghanistan’s capital often characterizes political economic relations in the city as stagnant and dysfunctional. But in these characterizations of Kabul, important questions about what is being done to develop the city within what appears to be an arrested developmental context remain underexamined or unasked. My dissertation studies efforts by Afghanistan’s government to restructure the national economy and reshape society in the capital via the construction of a new urban center— “Kabul New City.” Examining Kabul New City offers the chance to work through the puzzles of Afghanistan’s capital to better understand the city’s constitutive political economy from local to international scales. The Thompson-Burkhead award will support the initial stages of this research.

The origins of Kabul New City date back as early as 2005 when a rural area northeast of Kabul was identified as having the most potential for controlled urban expansion. In 2010, a master plan was approved boasting the creation of the “city of the century” and hundreds of thousands of new jobs and housing units with the goal of luring private investment for the project, particularly foreign capital. The master plan called for 70% of the new city’s financial needs (ranging from USD 34 to 80 billion) to be borne by private investors and 30% to be fulfilled through mixed public-private partnerships and international donor support. To attract funding, the master plan stressed that the new city would feature a “business environment with legislation favorable to private investors,” supported by a “one-stop shop” government agency.[1]

In an interview in 2010, Rafaat Ludin, a lead investor in the project whose U.S.-based company profited off a mortgage lending scheme for planned housing units in the new capital, stated that he approaches development by giving people “something to lose.” If they have something to lose, he argues, “they do everything not to lose it”.[2] While abstract, Ludin’s remark provides a glimpse at a central motive in the Kabul New City project. As opposed to current urban realities of self-provisioning, informal work, and reliance on kinship networks, Ludin asserts that Kabul requires an economy where needs are met and mediated in a more formalized manner. Understood in the context of neoliberal ideologies that have driven development projects across the Global South, the “something” in Ludin’s quote can be read as a “wage relation,” or equally, “a class position.” By this logic, the Kabul New City project represents an opportunity to further a process of class formation and a transition in the subsumption of labor in Afghanistan’s capital, which has been left undirected over 40 years of war and civil strife.

Despite ambitious planning and advertising, the Kabul New City project stalled a few years into the first phase of its rollout. Constant security threats halted necessary survey work by foreign contractors, and legal challenges ensued when former residents of the project site protested their displacement and were charged with theft of governmental lands. The Kabul New City project was, however, reborn in 2016 when its original scope was expanded to a metropolitan region for the new city. Anticipating a drawdown to foreign financial and military assistance in Afghanistan, newer plans called for zones of sustained industrial and agricultural production around the capital. Still, while these plans were accompanied by a sleek website, enticing designs from international architectural firms, and billions of dollars in promised funding from new investors, a close examination of the expanded mission for Kabul New City reveals a jumble of broad objectives with little detail on how they will be achieved. To date, the visible activities completed by the project are few and far between, with only a limited number of buildings and roads actually constructed.

In many respects, the Kabul New City project exemplifies the dysfunctions that popularly characterize Kabul. But for all the seeming failures of Kabul New City, plans are still moving forward. There may be more dreaming than anything else, but this does not mean that what is achieved by the project in doing so is any less real or successful. An entire network of actors still operates around the project, locals and expats are purchasing properties, money is being made, and changes on the ground, albeit limited, are serving material interests and having impacts on people’s lives. Karl Marx writes that we must force “frozen circumstances to dance by singing to them their own melody.”[3] To write off Kabul New City as yet another example of frozen or failed urban development is a refusal to see how the project exists in motion and leaves an incomplete evaluation of the dynamic contradictions undergirding its political economy.

In light of this framing, inquiries into Kabul New City cease to be concerned with if the project is a failure or success. Instead, newer questions about where and for whom the project is a failure or success become more pertinent. To understand how the project functions, and what it has and may still achieve, my research will answer: 1) how is Kabul New City framed and executed by project designers and implementing actors?; 2) how is this project understood and experienced by current and prospective residents of the proposed site for Kabul New City?; and, 3) in what ways does the framing and execution of the project and its impacts on residents link urban development to capital accumulation and class formation? Theoretically, this study contributes to critical scholarship on Kabul as well as literatures in geography and urban studies on new cities of the Global South, theories of global capitalism and capitalist class relations, and processes of exclusion and dispossession through urbanization.

Through my first question, I will attend to how “progress” in the Kabul New City project is defined and measured across labor hierarchies in design and implementing institutions, from high-level governmental officials and company executives to those engaged in day-to-day project operations, such as junior urban planning officials, middle managers, and construction workers. In question two, I explore how the framing and execution of the project directly impacts the lives of local populations as well as their response to project activities. With question three, I seek to understand what capital accumulation and class formation look like in the Kabul New City project. A deeper study of capital accumulation will include identifying patterns around the profit rates of real estate investments and speculative construction in Kabul New City as well as efforts by the state in Afghanistan to provide securities for these investments. Indicators for class formation will include the division and forms of labor among workers in the project, formal or informal strike activity, and land possession and dispossession. In each question, I will be attentive to the relationship between economic realities and political subjectivities like gender, national identity, and so on.

To answer question one and two, I will conduct semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document collection. For question two in particular, I will carry out photo elicitation, in which current and prospective residents of the site for Kabul New City will be asked to photograph urban experiences, which will then serve as a basis for further conversation on current realities and hopes for the future. I will answer question three by analyzing and cataloging data collected in the first two questions as well as collecting additional documents on economic and labor statistics from established contacts. I will employ snowball sampling to build on current contacts with government officials, organizations, and private individuals in Kabul. Given security concerns and the COVID-19 pandemic, I plan to hold interviews online as much as proves feasible. I am fluent in Farsi-Dari, which is one of Afghanistan’s official languages and effectively, the common language of Kabul.

[1] DCDA. 2016. “The Master Plan- Strategic Plan.” Dehsabz-Barikab City Development Authority. Accessed 3/10/2021. http://www.dcda.gov.af/The-Master-Plan.html

[2] “Rafaat Ludin on NanoTech Conference in Denver.” 2010. Youtube video, 3:53. Posted by “Rafaat Ludin,” May 27, 2013. Accessed 3/10/2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM99R9499NQ. Emphasis added.

[3] Marx, Karl. 1967. "Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction." In Writings of

the Young Marx on Philosophy and Science. Edited and translated by Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. 249-64. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor.