Imperial Abandonment

This article examines diasporic-national relationships during and in the immediate aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after an almost 20-year war and occupation. By examining the struggle to evacuate and apply for humanitarian parole, I make a two-part argument about the workings and lived experience of US imperial statecraft. The first part is that diasporic-national experiences navigating both improvised humanitarian borders and long-standing bureaucratic immigration processes reveal the spatial and temporal reach of the US empire’s border-making practices in periods of imperial withdrawal. Domestic institutions extend their reach into imperial zones of occupation and persist well after imperial withdrawal, thus contradicting the US state’s claim that withdrawal coincides with self-determination. The second part is that nationals and diasporic subjects experience and conceptualize the immobilizing effects of the withdrawal as a form of imperial abandonment. This aftermath is marked by bureaucratic violence in the form of long wait times, complicated forms, and transnational financial procurements. The sense of abandonment that emerges is neither a formalized, collective anti-imperial politics nor an implicit call on empire to embrace those it left behind. Rather, to articulate abandonment is an act of exposure around the duplicitous logics that have organized the US imperial project in Afghanistan.