Deconstructing the Role of Afghanistan in Regional Security Complex Theory

Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT), developed by Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, explains international security through regions: clusters of states whose security concerns are so closely linked that they cannot sensibly be analysed apart. States that sit between these regions are described as “insulators”, places where neighbouring security dynamics meet and are absorbed rather than transmitted. In the theory’s best-known account, Afghanistan is one of them, standing between South Asia, the Gulf and the post-Soviet states of Central Asia.

My dissertation deconstructs that classification. It asks whether a label that implies passivity can describe a country that has repeatedly been at the centre of regional and great-power security concerns. Reading RSCT’s own criteria against Afghanistan’s position, I argue that Afghanistan does not simply separate its neighbours’ security concerns but helps to generate and connect them.

On that basis I propose understanding Afghanistan as an “instigator” of regional security dynamics. The dissertation reflects on what this shift means for the theory, in particular for how RSCT treats the states on the edges of regional security complexes.

How Afghanistan is classified shapes how its neighbours, and the analysts who study them, understand risk in the wider region. If Afghanistan is treated as a buffer, instability there looks containable; if it is a driver, regional security cannot be analysed without it. The question has become more pressing since 2021.

This dissertation is the starting point for my proposed doctoral research: developing the idea of the instigator state and testing how states on the boundaries of security complexes shape the regions around them.