Foreclosing the political: State-building and the management of difference in Afghanistan

State-building has become the technique used by networks of liberal global governance to bring order to a seemingly chaotic world. This paper tracks how this series of practices is genealogically linked to the idea of the liberal peace and how it consequently is helping to realize an idea openly disavowed by the Western world, the End of History. Using discourse analysis, I explain how the state-building program in Afghanistan is furthering liberal efforts to eliminate space for a non-liberal other. This paper argues that state-building and the West's reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan present the deeply political activity of hiving off difference internationally as a technical, non-political activity. After the mixed results of relying on disaggregated networks to deliver services, the state has returned in a big way by guaranteeing liberal subjectivity and serving as a means of regulating the everyday politics of Afghanistan.