ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the post-2001 conflict-related assistance effort in Afghanistan (with the focus on aid securitisation and militarisation) in terms of the dominant problematisations (counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency), knowledges (e.g. Human Terrain Mapping), strategies and technologies of governing (e.g. ‘winning hearts and minds’) and the ways in which people in need of assistance were constructed (e.g. as a social base for insurgency). The chapter argues that the policies and practices of aid securitisation and militarisation in post-2001 Afghanistan were unprecedented and signalled further aid instrumentalisation and its incorporation into the war effort, which combined biopolitical concerns with sovereign violence.
