The Memory Box-Initiative: Nonextractivist Research Methodologies and the Struggle for an Architecture of Remembrance in Kabul,Afghanistan

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), a Kabul-based civil society organization and arts-activism platform, together with various self-organized, local war victims associations, has fought an uphill battle to challenge Afghanistan’s entrenched culture of impunity and make a contribution to a more just, democratic and peaceful country from the bottom-up. The current article critically describes, theorizes, and poeticizes one particular aspect of this decade-long struggle, the so-called Memory Box-Initiative, inspired by Augusto Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Challenging the fact that in many urban centers of Afghanistan, and in particular in the capital Kabul, a great number of public monuments and buildings are dedicated to war criminals, a veritable architecture of impunity, the aim of the initiative is the creation of a counter-hegemonic, victims-centered architecture of remembrance, taking place in a context of a highly contested Transitional Justice process. The main sections of the article address the following three issues: (a) the attempt by Afghanistan’s political, religious, and military elites to undermine the efforts of the country’s war victims to challenge the current culture of impunity by promoting a cityscape in the image of what they consider to be war heroes; (b) the response by the Afghan community of war victims in the form of the Memory Boxes and subsequent advocacy efforts in the public sphere; and (c) the embedding of the Memory Boxes within the larger framework of what is currently being theorized as “nonextractivist methodologies” as part of what is known as the Epistemologies of the South, as proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The article will conclude with a call for increased epistemological and methodological insubordination and the need for further research and, above all, experimentation in combining the Memory Boxes and the Epistemologies of the South in the global struggle for social and cognitive justice.