Stories and Statecraft

Abstract

This chapter is focused on the uses of curated stories in cultural diplomacy as a soft power strategy to absorb and defuse antiwar sentiment among women in Afghanistan and the Western women who read and engage with their stories. It looks at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), a series of online creative writing workshops conducted by US-based mentors with Afghan women in English. The mentors are genuinely motivated by a desire to share the stories of Afghan women widely and to make visible the abuses they suffer, but their framing of the project encourages responses and outcomes that often reproduce the structural conditions of subjection rather than challenging them. This chapter explores how stories can be drawn into strategies of imperial statecraft, can help to construct modes of Western liberal subjectivity, and, conversely, may contain strategically placed critiques of imperialist projects.