Thomas Barfield

Afghanistan has experienced four foreign invasions and withdrawals in the past 175 years. All these foreign forces entered Afghanistan keen to remake the country –all left content to let the Afghans run the place pretty much as they saw fit.  While the importance of this historical legacy is much touted, few look at the details to examine how it was that insurgents so successfully got foreign powers to leave the country but proved surprisingly ineffective at replacing the foreign backed governments in Kabul that retained an international patron. Indeed insurgents have successfully ousted only governments that lost their international patronage. Understanding this seeming paradox demands an integration of the dynamics of Afghan domestic politics with that of the wider world. 

Dr. Thomas Barfield’s current research focuses on problems of political development in Afghanistan, particularly on systems of local governance and dispute resolution. He has also published extensively on contemporary and historic nomadic pastoral societies in Eurasia with a particular emphasis on politics and economy.

Dr. Barfield conducted ethnographic fieldwork in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s as well as shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Uzbekistan. He is author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan (1981), The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989), and The Nomadic Alternative (1993), co-author of Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991), and editor of Blackwell’s Dictionary of Anthropology (1997). Barfield received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 that led to the publication of his newest book, Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History (2010).

He is also director of Boston University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilization and currently serves as president of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies.