Episode 62: Afghanistan, Anti-Imperial Modernity and the Soviet Union with Adam Alimi

Dec 4, 2025

Adam Alimi, a PhD candidate studying Marxist development and Afghan modernity, joins to rethink Soviet-Afghan relations. He discusses how Afghan modernity grew from regional/global influences. He explains why Soviet ties shaped reform and politics, traces roots of Afghan communism, and contrasts Soviet state-led development with later Western interventions.

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INSIGHT

Modernity Emerged From Regional Networks

Afghan modernity was shaped by long-term regional and global connections, not just foreign imposition.
Communism, Islamism, and liberal reform all grew from nationalist state-building and shared modernizing roots.

INSIGHT

Communists Were Organic State Actors

Afghan communists were rooted in the state and middle-class networks, not isolated importations.
Their organization and Soviet ties made them well positioned to succeed the monarchy in the 1960s–70s.

INSIGHT

Soviet Ties Preceded The 1979 Invasion

The Soviet relationship with Afghanistan spanned a century and shaped Afghan politics long before 1979.
Treating the 1979 invasion as an isolated imperial rupture misses this deeper intimacy.

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On today's episode we discuss Afghan communism and the consequences of the 1978 Saur Revolution in the context of a longer story of Afghan anti-imperial modernity and Soviet-Afghan relations.
How and why was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan different from interventions by other powers in the country? How do analyses of the 1979 Soviet invasion that center the “empire” framework limit our understanding of the history of Afghan anti-imperial modernity, Soviet-Afghan relations and Afghanistan’s place in the world?
Our guest is Adam Alimi and we use his article ”Beyond Empire: Why the Soviet invasion (and withdrawal) of Afghanistan was different” as the basis for the conversation.
Article summary and link:
The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 set off the usual literatures of failure in studies on Afghanistan. These accounts – graveyard of empires, tribalism, Islam – helped temper the hubris of US foreign policy in its so-called ‘longest war’. Naturally, unforgiving Afghanistan was doomed to remain in the Stone Age, as the British and Soviets had discovered before. Still, the Soviet comparison as an account of the broader failure in Afghanistan is wanting. By drawing on newer global histories of Afghanistan, the periodization of modernity-failure is recast in more interesting ways. Specifically, this article advances the argument that the Soviet connection in Afghanistan, understood here in the long term and not just as the invasion in 1979, cohered with the winds of modernity and anti-imperialism animating the region in the twentieth century. Markers of Afghan modernity, such as late modernization (state-building), political economy (rural social property relations), and revolution (communism), are explored. The US occupation after 2001 is also used as a point of comparison to refocus the history of Afghanistan beyond empire.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19436149.2025.2499294
Adam Alimi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto Canada. His research focuses on Marxist theories of development in the Global South.