Institutional Metamorphosis at the Intersection of Discourses: An Examination of the Conflict Between Posited Rationality and Traditional Legitimacy in Afghanistan (2001–2021)

Abstract

This study aims to dissect the epistemological roots of political stagnation in Afghanistan by examining the dialectical tension between “modern posited rationality” and “premodern traditional legitimacy” during the period from 2001 to 2021. The central research question is based on the proposition of how the “regime of truth of tradition” was able to assimilate and transform the modern signifiers of modernization within civil and legal institutions, thereby generating “discursive entropy” in the state-building project. The research employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), drawing upon Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach. The findings indicate that political modernization in post-2001 Afghanistan was reduced to a formalistic and artificially sustained process due to the incongruity between the “text of modern law” and the “traditional habitus of social agents.” The analysis demonstrates that civil and educational institutions, such as universities and the judiciary, rather than functioning as centers of transition toward Weberian rationality and a Habermasian public sphere, became arenas for the reproduction of ethnic solidarities and rigid jurisprudential interpretations. This functional transformation caused democratic concepts to be absorbed into the black hole of “neopatrimonialism,” resulting in a profound crisis of political legitimacy. Ultimately, the article concludes that the collapse of the Afghan political order in 2021 was the outcome of the dominance of “rigid traditional legitimacy” over “corrupt posited rationality,” a failure that reflects the inevitable consequence of imposed modernization undertaken without the reconstruction of the cultural and identity-based foundations of Afghan society.