How to Find Out: Bunkerisation and NATO’s Knowledge Production in Afghanistan

Interventions are taking place in a spectrum of contexts in volatile and highly kinetic environments. Consequently, they have a high need for situational awareness and analysis of the environment in which they are operating. This need for knowledge is two-fold: first, intervenes need to protect themselves, second, they need an understanding of the environment to work successfully with local partners, to fulfil their roles and eventually to make their mission a success. Although the need for knowledge thus is clear, producing it is severely and increasingly challenged by insecurity in countries of operation and the consequently increasing tendency of bunkerization, where intervenors are working and living behind the secured walls and the barbed wire of high-secure installations (Duffield, 2012). With this, knowledge production is becoming ever more difficult, with interveners more and more being dependent on few local interlocutors who are not neutral but exploit their knowledge monopoly for their own good (Muench and Veit, 2018) This paper examines NATO’s practices of knowledge production in the Resolute Support (RS) mission in Afghanistan. Based on original data from Kabul, it argues that the remote mode of knowledge production influences the strategic narrative the organisation uses with regards to the country, which names the mission a success despite increasing number of attacks in Afghanistan. References: Duffield, M. (2012) ‘Challenging Environments: Danger, Resilience and the Aid Industry’. Security Dialogue 43(5), pp: 475 – 492. Muench, P. And Veit, A. (2018). ‘Intermediaries of Intervention: How Local Power Brokers Shape External Peace- and State-building in Afghanistan and the Congo’. International Peacekeeping 25(2), pp: 266 – 292.