An enemy we created: the myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda merger in Afghanistan
An enemy we created: the myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda merger in Afghanistan
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我们创造的敌人：塔利班与基地组织在阿富汗合并的神话
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发表时间：
2014
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通讯作者：
M. Nazif Shahrani
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作者：
M. Nazif Shahrani
从理论上讲，群众被视为“容易被操纵的被动生物”。。。他们在很大程度上被视为同质的、无知的、依赖的企业集团，具有孩子般的品质“(MalešEvić，《种族社会学》(2004年)，第123页)。正如本尼迪克特·安德森的名言所言：“在过去的两个世纪里，正是这种友爱使数百万人愿意为有限的想象力而死，而不是去杀人”(想象中的社区：民族主义的传播和起源思考(2006)，第7页)。同样令人质疑的是克里斯蒂亚公开宣称的原始论，它将种族群体视为“相对固定的”预先赋予者(第8页)，或者至多是文德式的企业身份，但没有详细说明为什么这样的假设可以在认识论上做出，或者为什么尽管有所有这些变化的联盟、分裂和分裂，将这些种族群体视为固定的、实质性的和不同的分析单位在理论上仍然是站得住脚的。这项研究的强项显然是它的经验维度。作者在近十年的时间里在阿富汗和西巴尔干地区进行的实地研究中所收集的数据和进行的大量访谈--往往是在极端考验的条件下--确实令人印象深刻。它对冲突研究领域的贡献的理论价值可能会对北美具有更明显的理性主义/实证主义倾向的国际关系学者有更大的吸引力。然而，与克里斯蒂亚相反，像我这样的反思主义者会辩称，最终，所有的身份冲突都是为了相互竞争但已构建的信仰体系而战，在这种情况下，种族冲突是由民族化话语引起的，也是民族化话语的一部分，在这种话语中，种族分裂的政治是由精英和大众共同表演制定的。我们这些试图理解这些冲突的学者是共同的主角，因为我们通过对冲突的原因、模式和动态的叙述，通过以特定的方式描绘我们开始研究的冲突，为这些冲突的制定做出了贡献。那么，一个人是否同意对这些种族冲突的特定叙述，就像克里斯蒂亚的工具主义描述一样，既是一个主观信仰问题，也是一个选民相信种族民族主义精英的民族化政治修辞的问题，这本书把这本书放在了中心位置。
tological, the masses are treated as “passive creatures prone to easy manipulation . . . they are largely viewed as homogeneous, ignorant, dependent conglomerates, with child-like qualities” (Malešević, The Sociology of Ethnicity (2004), p. 123). It simply fails to capture, in Benedict Anderson’s famous words, “the fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origins of Nationalism (2006), p. 7). Equally questionable is Christia’s openly professed primordialism that treats ethnic groups as “relatively fixed” pre-givens (p. 8), or at best Wendtian corporate identities, without once elaborating why such presumptions can be epistemologically made or why, despite all these shifting alliances, fragmentations and fractionalizations, it is still ontologically tenable to treat those ethnic groups as fixed, substantive, and distinct units of analysis. The strong point of this study is clearly its empirical dimension. The data the author has painstakingly collected and the sheer number of interviews conducted in field research in Afghanistan and the Western Balkans over the course of almost a decade – often under extremely testing conditions – is truly impressive. The theoretical value of its contribution to the field of conflict studies may have greater appeal for International Relations scholars in North America with a more pronounced rationalist/positivist bent. Contrary to Christia though, “reflectivists” such as myself would argue that ultimately, all identity conflicts are fought over competing but constructed belief systems, in the case of ethnic conflicts caused by and part of an ethnicized discourse, in which politics of ethnic division are performatively enacted by elites and the masses alike. We scholars trying to make sense of these conflicts are co-protagonists, in so far as we contribute to their enactment through our narratives of their causes, patterns, and dynamics, through portraying the conflict we set out to study in a specific way. Whether one subscribes then to a given narrative of these ethnic conflicts, as with, for example, Christia’s instrumentalist account, is as much a subjective matter of belief as is a constituency believing in the ethnicized political rhetoric of the ethno-nationalist elites this book puts center stage.