Introduction : the impact of four decades of war and violence on afghan society and political culture / Nazif Shahrani -- Technologies of power-competing discourses on national identity, statehood, and state stability -- Afghanistan : a turbulent state in transition / Amin Saikal -- Afghanistan's "traditional" Islam in transition : the deep roots of Taliban extremism / Bashir Ahmad Ansari -- Language, poetry, and identity in Afghanistan : poetic texts, changing contexts / Mohammad Omar Sharifi -- Lineages of the urban state : locating continuity and change in post-2001 Kabul / Khalid Homayun Nadiri and M. Farshid Alemi Hakimyar -- Webs and spiders : four decades of violence, intervention, and statehood in Afghanistan (1978-2016) / Timor Sharan -- Merchant-warlords : changing forms of leadership in Afghanistan's unstable political economy / Noah Coburn -- Borders, access to strategic resources, and challenges to state stability / Ahmad Shayeq Qassem -- Brought to you by foreigners, warlords, and local activists : TV and the Afghan culture wars / Wazhmah Osman -- Personal and collective identities, gender relations, and the trust deficit -- "The war destroyed our society" : masculinity, violence, and shifting cultural idioms among Afghan Pashtun / Andrea Chiovenda -- Engendering the Taliban / Sonia Ahsan -- Anticipating discontinuous change : Afghanistan in retrospect and prospect / Robert L. Canfield and Fahim Masoud -- Adapting to a new political ecology of uncertainties at the margins -- Badakhshanis since the Saur revolution : struggle, triumph, hope, and uncertainty / M. Nazif Shahrani -- Hazara civil society activists and local, national, and international political institutions / Melissa Kerr Chiovenda -- Adapting to three decades of uncertainty : the flexibility of social institutions among Baloch groups in Afghanistan / Just Boedeker -- Party institutionalization meets women's empowerment? Acquiring power and influence in Afghanistan / Ann Larson -- Violence, social services delivery, and the rising trust deficit -- Childbirth and social change in Afghanistan / Kylea Laina Liese -- Signatures of distrust in contemporary Afghanistan : more than a decade of development effort for vulnerable groups : the case of disability / Parul Bakhshi and Jean-Francois Trani