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"The Defiant Border explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls from the colonial period into the twenty-first century. This book looks at local Pashtun tribes' modes for evading first British colonial, then Pakistani, governance; the ongoing border dispute between Pakistan and Afghanistan; and continuing interest in the region from Indian, US, British, and Soviet actors. It reveals active attempts first by British, then by Pakistani, agents to integrate the tribal region, ranging from development initiatives to violent suppression. The Defiant Border also considers the area's influence on relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, as well as its role in the United States' increasingly global Cold War policies. Ultimately, the book considers how a region so peripheral to major centers of power has had such an impact on political choices throughout the eras of empire, decolonization, and superpower competition, up to the so-called 'War on Terror.' One of the only historical studies of Pakistan's Pashtun tribal area (post-1947), which complements existing anthropological literature on the region and histories of the colonial era to provide readers with a fuller understanding of the region. Integrates histories of South Asia, decolonization, and the global Cold War, which provides readers with a holistic view of the region by recognizing the interconnections between international diplomacy, regional developments, subaltern movements, and colonial legacies. Considers the impact of non-state actors--Pashtun tribes--on South Asian state-building, which complements work done on state-building in India, extends understanding of the impact of peripheral areas on state power and practice, and expands understanding of the history of Pakistan"--From publisher's website

This article uses Afghan engagement with twentieth-century international politics to reflect on the fluctuating nature of Afghan statehood and citizenship, with a particular focus on Afghanistan's political 'revolutions' in 1973 and 1978. By considering the ways in which Afghan leaders asserted their politics in the international sphere, some of the key concerns of the Afghan state become clear. In order to assert their authority and gain credence among international observers, Afghan leaders both drew on and rejected their state's political history, ultimately leading to a top-down reconceptualization of Afghan statehood and the citizen which relied on a territorially defined state, rather than ethnicity. Two issues especially shaped Afghan foreign engagement: a longstanding tradition of political neutrality, or bi-tarafi, and demands for international recognition of an autonomous Pashtun state in the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands. These interests frequently conflicted, but both played critical roles in prolonging regional instability. Afghan leadership ultimately latched onto, publicized, and justified contradictory definitions of Afghan statehood and citizenship that could not be reconciled.

The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in US policy during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, scholars have overly focused on the idea that the CIA promoted a global 'jihad'. This article instead looks at knowledge-formation within the agency to understand US approaches to the conflict, and to Afghan society more generally. Drawing on recently declassified analyses and reporting from intra-agency departments, this article reveals that agency officials focused largely on the idea of 'tradition' to understand the organization and motivations of the Afghan resistance. This trope emphasized Afghanistan's historically 'tribal' and ethnically divided nature and presented a static view of an unchangeable, backwards society incapable of coordinating to counter the Soviet military presence. In this reading, officials actually downplayed in the importance of Islam to Afghan society, dismissing it as a potential political force in the region. Ultimately, this article reflects on CIA officials' limitations in envisioning a post-invasion Afghanistan, finding explanations in their rigid views of Afghan political and social organization which prevented them from recognizing the invasion's potential to catalyze longer-term changes.

AbstractFrom the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war.

"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."--

Border studies in South Asia privilege everyday experiences, and the constructed nature of borders and state sovereignty. This article argues that state elites in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1950s-60s actively pursued territorial sovereignty through border policy, having inherited ambiguous colonial-era frontiers. Comparing security and development activities along the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the better-known case of India and Pakistan's ceasefire line in Kashmir, the article demonstrates that the exercise of sovereignty required a bounded space that only borders could provide and a rejection of competing border zone authorities. The local specificity of each border, however, created the historical conditions in which political elites acted. Combining an archival history methodology with conceptual insights from political geography and critical international relations, the article uses an original integration of two important Asian border spaces into one analysis in order to highlight tensions between sovereignty's theory and practice.

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.

This book provides the first history of the British and American Intelligence Divisions (IDs) in occupied Germany and the liaison between them. It reveals that after the fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, much of Germany was controlled by an Anglo-American secret system of rule which was the real backbone of the occupation and largely explains its successful outcomes. Based in Heidelberg, the American ID was the senior American military intelligence organisation in occupied Germany, responsible for the security of American forces in Europe. The British ID, based in Herford, was a purpose-built intelligence organisation designed to ensure the security of the British Zone of Germany and to help achieve the Allied occupation objectives. The IDs undertook military, scientific, security, political, and state-building intelligence tasks which each form the focus of a chapter in this book.