Global mobile Afghanistan, c1900 to the present

Afghanistan has for long been associated in scholarly and more popular work with images of remoteness and isolation from the modern world. Over the past two decades in particular, however, scholarship on the country has increasingly brought attention to Afghanistan’s multiple connections to a wide range of contexts, both regional and global. This work has focused on the agency that mobile people from Afghanistan have exerted by connecting the country to global transformations, and shaping the influences these have had on its dynamics. Scholars have brought attention to the importance of social networks made of traders and merchants, students, religious scholars, as well as refugees and exiles in mediating Afghanistan’s connection with the global world over the twentieth century.