A State Built On Sand How Opium Undermined Afghanistan Mansfield by Mansfield, David 9780190608316, 9780190638535, 0190608315, 0190638532 instant download after payment.

Variations in opium poppy production in Afghanistan had
long been associated with how the state was perceived at the time of the
2001 invasion. The Taliban, for instance, had imposed a cultivation ban
in 2000–01. But the international community’s subsequent attempts to
prohibit opium production became intimately linked with its own state-
building project, as rising levels of cultivation were seen as evidence
of the failure of those international donors who spearheaded
reconstruction in provinces like Helmand and Nangarhar.

Mansfield’s book examines why drug control has been
imposed in Afghanistan; he documents the actors involved; and he
scrutinises how prohibition served divergent and competing interests.
Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork in rural areas, he explains
how these bans affected farming communities, and how prohibition endured
in some areas while in others opium production bans undermined
livelihoods and destabilised the political order, fuelling violence and
rural rebellion.

Above all this book challenges how we have come to understand political power in rural
Afghanistan. Mansfield highlights the role that rural communities have
played in shaping the political terrain, including establishing the
conditions under which they could persist with opium production.