Classing Afghanistan: Privilege and exclusion through Post-2001 liberal state-building

By posing three guiding questions - (i) how a two-decade liberal state-building project in Afghanistan unravelled so rapidly in 2021, (ii) why state officials, security forces and ordinary people alike offered limited resistance, and (iii) how socioeconomic transformations shaped ordinary Afghanistanis' attachment to the state - this dissertation examines class relations and the rapid unravelling of the post-2001 state in Afghanistan. Drawing on primary data from interviews and secondary sources within a qualitative single-case study, and employing a relational, multidimensional class lens grounded in Bourdieu's theory of capital alongside Guha's contribution to Subaltern Studies, I argue that, over two decades, the reconstruction, security, modernisation, and liberal state-building project pursued by a transnational network of governing actors enabled the emergence and consolidation of new class relations in the country. This involved both nascent and pre-existing privileged groups and subaltern populations. These processes deepened inequality and narrowed the Republic's base of social legitimacy, leaving a state that was institutionally dense but socially thin. Afghanistan's disintegration in August 2021 was one of the most dramatic state failures in recent history. To explain this failure, I move beyond familiar accounts of military collapse, foreign withdrawal, and poor leadership, and instead develop a relational, multidimensional class analysis. I show that this class order tied the loyalties of privileged Afghanistanis "upward" to transnational actors and funding networks rather than "horizontally" to a shared political community. Simultaneously, subaltern groups (structurally excluded from jobs, public services, and everyday safety) had little reason to take risks on behalf of a state that had not materially included them. The result was an order that could administer but could not summon defence. In advancing this line of reasoning, the dissertation argues that liberal state-building in Afghanistan is best understood as a class project. It produced a state built externally but never socially rooted, and therefore never meaningfully defended, suggesting that state-building projects without broad social attachment remain structurally brittle.