The War Bubble: Kabul's Shifting Warscape and Afghan-American Community

FATIMA MOJADDEDI, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in October 2012 to aid research on 'The War Bubble: Kabul's Shifting Warscape and Afghan-American Community, ' supervised by Dr. Rosalind C. Morris. This dissertation is based on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Kabul, Afghanistan. The research situates socio-cultural and economic transformations in Kabul within a trans-national framework that takes as its starting point the assertion that culture and economy are the primary mediums of warfare. The grantee examines the socio-cultural ramifications of the current war and Afghanistan's integration into an international war economy that demands a commodification of land, language, and culture alongside a devastating counterinsurgency, illustrating how an international web of social and economic relations shape both the city of Kabul and its massive green zone. Moreover, the dissertation illustrates a crucial transition from an urban economy of war to one of shared fantasies based on a future mining industry. This is inextricable from how the future is being re-imagined among both Afghans and Afghan-Americans as the notion of invisible treasure is fantasized as existing underground, shifting the site of surplus value from a tumultuous green zone economy and speculative real estate market to its new subterranean home, buttressing the belief that peace can only occur alongside an extractive industry and illustrating the crucial link between new forms of war profiteering and older logics of imperial violence.