Street Fights: The Commodification of Place Names in Post-Taliban Kabul City

Abstract

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ended the Taliban rule and brought to power a coalition government whose members had spent most of the previous decade fighting each other. After 2001, the rivalry between these groups was mainly pursued in the cultural sphere where each was fighting to shape the narrative of the war. Place names have been one of the main domains in which this ideological conflict has been fought. The contestation over place names in Kabul city has turned these mundane geographical signs into coveted commodities of great symbolic significance. This article examines the practice of place naming in post-Taliban Kabul to explore the cultural challenges of state-building in a postwar city. Based on official data and field observations, this article is informed by recent theoretical developments in the field of critical toponymy and specifically draws on the emerging debates on commodification of place names. In the post-Taliban era, the article shows, place names have turned into resources for accumulation of symbolic capital and political recognition. As a result, the state offers toponyms to buy political loyalty and nonstate groups often appropriate them illegally. The article contributes to existing scholarship on commodification of place names by linking it to questions of postwar state-building and spatialization of ethnic identity.