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.

Anna Larson is an independent analyst and writer. She has worked in Afghanistan since 2004, writing and teaching at SOAS, University of London and Tufts University.

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Vice President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.

Omar Sharifi is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota and Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at the American University of Afghanistan.