ABSTRACT
This chapter critically evaluates the current Talibanization discourse and compares it with that of the 1990s. It argues that the Taliban government discourse of both today and the 1990s does not represent any signs of postmodern biopolitical governmentality but is increasingly necropolitical. To explain that, the chapter first rejects Orientalist arguments identifying the Taliban merely as an extremist religious group and contests them and then offers a reinterpretation of the Talibanization as a reverse state-building discourse and process which is characterized by oppression, erasures, silences, and the production of a different and new kind of social existence – a condition which Mbembe terms “living dead” in a “death world”.
