Securing Profit: Threat Production as a Mechanism of Racial Capitalism in U.S.‐Occupied Kabul

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Kabul to argue that threat production should be understood as a mechanism of racial capitalism. Based on 15 months of fieldwork, including confidential security reports, observations of segregation systems, and Afghan media accounts, the analysis shows how private security companies in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan profited from the racialized presumption of Afghan dangerousness. Through numerical rating systems, selective knowledge production, and curated media summaries, Afghans were depicted as inherently threatening. These representations were reinforced by segregation regimes that divided the city into "foreigner" and Afghan zones, alongside wage hierarchies that paid Afghan guards a fraction of their Western counterparts for identical labour. The construction of Afghans as perpetual threats generated continuous demand for security services, allowing private companies to profit by selling protection from dangers they themselves (re)produced. I suggest that this process demonstrates how racial capitalism adapts in conflict zones, creating new markets not through resource extraction or land seizure but through the continual manufacture of racialized insecurity. While grounded in Kabul, the analysis contributes to broader debates on empire, capitalism, and security by highlighting how the commodification of racialized danger is increasingly central to the global security economy.