ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book clarifies the salient intellectual and political concerns, which the research seeks to address and place the research enquiry in its academic perspective. It reflects on certain elements in the theoretical discourse around nation, ethnicity, tribe and Islam, as both conception and lived historical experience in the Afghan context. The book dwells on the processes that facilitated in pushing the conflict in Afghanistan onto an ethno-political trajectory. It focuses on the actual processes that precipitated the transformation of conflict along the ethno-political axis. The book focuses on the sheer tragic irony of freedom from Soviet domination unleashing violent fragmentation under mujahideen. It clarifies the implications of the Taliban's attempt to resuscitate the old order reconfigured by long years of conflict. Roots of the conflict's seeming ethnicization are to be found in the endemic disarticulation between the Afghan state and its national minorities.
