Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan

While the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has usually been treated as a key Cold War case study, this perspective alone is insufficient. Instead, Elisabeth Leake argues, the real significance of the war in Afghanistan can only be understood by examining local, national, regional, and international imperatives and the interlinked histories of anti-colonial modernity, postcolonial statehood, the shifting norms of international relations, as well as the Cold War.

Elisabeth Leake is the Lee E. Dirks Chair in Diplomatic History at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She studied at Yale and the University of Cambridge, and previously held posts at the University of Leeds and Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press) and Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.