describes the carnival as a moment when rules are turned upside down and everything is permitted. It is shaped according to a pattern of play. It is a type of performance that is communal, without boundaries between performers and audience. The “Pink Balloons” project with its objective to bring happiness and peace to the war-torn country illustrates the inherent utopia that lies within the promise of postwar reconstruction.
The transition toward democracy in Afghanistan has triggered many apparent reversals that to a certain extent remind one of medieval Europe’s “carnival” as described by Bakhtin (1984b). During the carnival, ordinary life, rules, and hierarchies are temporarily suspended and overturned. Slaves may be “crowned” as kings just as kings are “decrowned” as slaves. The suspended moment and upside-down world of the carnival presents some commonalities with the transition period in Afghanistan where “masked games” hide the continuity of injustice. Even though the current context is immune from and devoid of the carnival’s liberating laughter, a number of inversions that work as leverages to reinforce the status quo can be identified in the same manner as the carnival offers a safety valve that ultimately sustains the dominant order.
First, in contrast with the religious edicts enforced by the Taliban, a new vision of “law and order” is being promoted, based on constitutional populism and a fetishized “rule of law” agenda destined to bring Afghanistan into the fold of “civilized nations.” But the blinding screen of the law poorly hides the endemic disorder that constitutes its twin and inseparable side. Second, “democratization” has meant the return to power of “military commanders”—alternatively labeled “warlords” or “mujahideen”—that had been ousted from the political arena by the previous regime. The “democratic” election of alleged war criminals, some of whom still own private militias and are involved in the narco-economy, has reversed the taken-for-granted telos of modernity, making the line between the licit and organized crime difficult to tell apart (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 40). Finally, women have been encouraged to become visible and access the public realm when the Taliban’s gender policies forbade them to do so. However, this visibility has become synonymous with danger and has obliged women to camouflage themselves in new ways.
This sudden inversion of the “old order” for a new one based on Western models of (neo)liberal democracies is marked by a schizophrenic state of uncertainty that has forced many Afghans to adapt and play roles in order to fit the dominant narrative of national reconstruction. For Mikhail Bakhtin, images of reversal twist through the folklore tradition of premodern Europe, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. In his view, such reversals express the creative energy of “a carnival sense of the world” (Bakhtin 1984a, 107). “Postwar” (which, in the case of Afghanistan, would be better described as “ongoing war”) is, of course, a moment that is in many ways deprived of the festive atmosphere of the carnival. However, the ambivalence of moral and social meanings produced by the “transition” limbo bears the disorienting and liminal characteristics of the “carnival.” The superposition and competition between various moral orders—Islam, international law, human rights, customary law—and the displacement of sovereignty into more concentrated forms of power and accumulation such as NATO troops, militiamen and commanders, and international organizations and NGOs as well as private contractors can be compared to the outrageous and contradictory images that make up carnival ambivalence.
(Post)war situations are often described as dramatic moments that involve violence, abuses, and a general state of lawlessness that necessitates prompt international support, especially in the legal field, to reestablish order. If this anarchic state of affairs is to a large extent a reality, the everyday experience of (post)war/reconstruction is also one that is marked by ambivalence, contradictions, and ironies that carry both constraining and enabling potentialities. The daily encounters between international humanitarian workers and Afghan aid recipients, reconstruction experts and Afghan civil servants, and Western feminists and ordinary Afghan women are often full of misunderstandings and divergent expectations that translate into a “dialogue of the deaf.” The necessity to master the dominant jargon of the “rule of law,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and “development” in order to access resources often creates ironic situations whereby Afghans are pushed to play roles and discipline themselves in certain ways. The story of Zahra, who decides to “become a man” in order to facilitate her access to the “public” illustrates the gender ironies of the reconstruction carnival. That transnational governance has opened new spaces for women contradicts the fact that many remain socially inaccessible to them.
Of course, it would be a gross exaggeration to detect in the current situation of Afghanistan the same utopian freedom that is enacted during carnival time. The daily NATO bombings made legitimate under international law and the state of destitution in which the vast majority of Afghans must live are concrete reminders of the violence that accompanies the “democratization” masquerade. What I want to emphasize here, using Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque,” is the new moral imagination born out of this violent encounter whereby the lines between the “good” and the “bad,” the “legal” and the “lethal,” to use Walter Benjamin’s terms in his “Critique of Violence” (1969), are blurred and displaced.
The “carnival of the (post)war” brings together actors with various subject positions, agendas, knowledge claims, and values and sometimes offers opportunities for subversion of the same kind as the ones deployed during the medieval carnival, absorbing its authoritarian other in a way that does not totally destroy but rather contains the threat it poses. Because Afghans have a long experience of foreign interference that has complicated their relationship to the state, they have developed a political consciousness and an instinctive sense of the “masquerade” that has allowed them to preserve a sense of continuity and personal autonomy. From this long history of resistance has emerged the reputation of Afghanistan as “Yâghestan” (the land of the rebellious). Historian Michael Barry (2002) has well illustrated the creative strategies of dissimulation Afghans have developed over the centuries to resist imperial domination, something he defines as the “yâghestan reflex.”
Because “democratization” efforts are accompanied by a sharp rise in crime and violence, with a more or less elected and representative regime that has brought with it a rising tide of lawlessness, Afghans’ mode of engagement with the “public sphere” has been marked by a general feeling of suspicion, mistrust, and resentment that defies dominant liberal conceptualizations of the “public” as a space for rational-critical dialogue. Indeed, in Jurgen Habermas’s view (1989), the “public sphere” is the locus of “communicative action,” that is, a site where cooperative action is undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. Individuals engaged in such dialogic transactions are making full use of reason in order to reach a consensus, which in turn guarantees the protection and defense of “the common good.” The formation of (inclusive and rational) public spheres in Western societies has been instrumental in establishing democracies and in producing citizens. Western classical liberalism has presumed the universal necessity of differentiated public and private spheres for the development of citizenship, civil society, and democratic statehood.
This idealized vision of the “public sphere” is in sharp contradiction with the social reality not only of those who have been excluded from the public in both the developed and the developing world (women, minorities) but also of the countries that must bear the burden of neocolonial/neoliberal domination. In the context of Afghanistan, the “public” domain, far from being a site of dialogical negotiations, is better understood as a stage for performance (Göle 2002), “poetic world making” (Warner 2002, 114), and carnivalesque expression. Commenting on the experience of voluntary “modernization” policies in Turkey, Nilüfer Göle emphasizes the performative dimension of non-Western public spheres, especially in countries where the process of state formation has been shaped by unequal interactions with the West. She writes: “Because the public sphere provides a stage for performance rather than an abstract frame for textual and discursive practices, the ocular aspect in the creation of significations and the making of social imaginaries becomes
