Beyond Long-Distance Nationalism: Khorasan and the Re-imagination of Afghanistan

Abstract This article explores the geographical imagination of diasporic activists from Afghanistan. It examines the significance of the historic-geographic region of Khorasan for their attempts to re-imagine Afghanistan and its place in the region and wider world. The article documents ethnographically the forms of intellectual exchange in which these intellectual-activists participate, and their modes of materializing the geographical imagination of Khorasan in everyday life. Rather than analyzing their geographical imagination solely through the lens of ethnicity, it treats it as reflecting the activists’ underlying yearning for sovereign agency and as an attempt to forge politically recognizable subjects capable of action.