Annika Schmeding

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Fellow at Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen

The research report examines the scope and impact of German Official Development Assistance (ODA) in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, focusing on the “networked approach” during NATO operations. The report delves into the genealogy of ODA in neoliberal development policy, highlighting its role in uneven development and dependency. It discusses German...

Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the...

This article examines dream practices among a Sufi community in present-day Afghanistan. The main argument revolves around the question of how preparing for, expecting, and communally negotiating the veracity of dreams stands in a process of individual and communal becoming that braids divine presence into the lives of Sufi disciples. The article i...

Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who hav...

As the US-led global “War on Terror” enters its third decade, the structural, physical, and epistemological violence it has wrought continues to shape lives and landscapes in Afghanistan and Iraq. At present, the scholarship of an entire generation of Middle Eastern Studies has been embedded in the geopolitical realities of this indefinite war, eve...

The article centres on the inter-generational memories and experiences of caring for, and sometimes having to destroy, books and writing in an attempt to stay safe. The article is based on interviews with Afghan writers, photographers, archivists, book sellers and book lovers in the summer of 2021 and in the years since about these experiences. The...

This article proposes that stigmas connected to social categories of exclusion prevalent during life extend into dealings with the dead, here referred to as ‘necro-ostracism’, in the context of death and burial of Muslim nomadic populations in urban Afghanistan. Based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar-e Sharif, it expl...

Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the...

The article discusses how social positioning, socialization and various ideological stances mattered in encounters between Sufi communities and the Taliban in the 1990s and how this might inform our understanding of their present-day negotiations. It looks at religious governance from a community negotiation perspective informed through oral histor...

This article offers a case study of contemporary female Sufi leadership and teaching within a branch of the Qadirriyah Sufi order originating with pir Allama Faizani. Based on ethnographic participant observation and oral history interviews, it traces the development of female inclusion within spiritual practice, such as meditative zikr [lit. remem...

Writing about dreams has of course a long history within Islam and Muslim societies. Dreams have been recorded in Arabic and Persian chronicles; royal dreams have been immortalized in prose such as Ferdowsi’s Shahnahmeh; and dream manuals offer evidence of the practices that ensued from dreams.Through my contact with different varieties of Muslim d...