THE FAILURE OF JIHAD AS STATE-BUILDING: ISLAMIST IDEOLOGY AND THE REPRODUCTION OF TRADITIONAL SEGMENTATION IN AFGHANISTAN

This article examines the structural limits of political Islam as a state-building project through a critical engagement with Olivier Roy's theory of Islamist failure in Afghanistan. Drawing on Roy’s analysis of the Afghan jihad (1979–1992), the study investigates why Islamist movements reproduced rather than transformed Afghanistan’s tribal, ethnic, and patronage-based social structures. Through historical-comparative analysis and process tracing, the article demonstrates how Islamist actors became embedded within pre-existing networks of power, failing to construct autonomous political institutions. This study extends Roy’s framework by tracing the diffusion of “Islamized segmentation” into post-Soviet Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan, and its influence on later transnational militant networks, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The findings argue that jihad’s failure as a state-building project was not merely military or organizational but fundamentally ideological: Islamist political imagination, centered on the umma and moral legitimacy, proved structurally insufficient for building durable territorial and bureaucratic authority. Evidence from the Taliban’s second emirate confirms the continued relevance of this argument. Political Islam in Afghanistan remains more effective as a legitimizing framework for fragmented power than as a model for modern state formation.