As a result of a 20-year international military campaign, Afghanistan has been at the centre of global academic and policy debates on intervention and statebuilding. Yet these debates have often been piecemeal, ahistorical and centred in western logics, interests and concerns. This volume provides a new, critical compilation of scholarly contributions from emerging and established Afghan and international scholars that defy these trends.

The volume targets a new generation of students and scholars of Afghanistan– a generation looking critically and retrospectively at the longest military intervention in US history. This is a readership well-attuned to the complexities of the Afghan context and the dilemmas of international engagement more broadly. Beyond criticism of a failed intervention and the often reductive analytical tools that have been used to assess it, the chapters in this collection provide novel epistemological approaches to conceptions of power and authority in Afghanistan.

Breaking new ground, Power and Authority gives voice to and consolidates in one volume the first generation of influential Afghan scholars to emerge after forty years and offers them the opportunity to speak with (and back to) those who have come before.