This thesis investigates the politics of cultural heritage preservation in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2015. Based on several periods of fieldwork in Afghanistan between 2012 and 2015 and combined with observations from working on a number of internationally sponsored heritage projects in Kabul, I study the new and complex intersections between cultural heritage and politics. I argue that a particular configuration of heritage and politics has emerged after the destructions of the Buddhas at Bamyan and show how the characteristics of this ‘post-Bamyan’ heritage paradigm are revealed through a number of case studies of internationally sponsored heritage work. These case studies reveal how politics and heritage are currently configured across a diverse range of governments, state and non-state actors, NGOs, individuals and forms of expertise and why such intersections matter. The case studies include the ongoing conservation of the niches of the Bamyan Buddhas; the work of the Kabul based Scottish NGO Turquoise Mountain; a project to restore and conserve the Khwaja Parsa mosque and shrine complex by Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Balkh; and a number of projects focused on Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic past. This research has responded to a call from across the discipline of Heritage Studies to look more closely at the relationships between heritage, power and politics as heritage work is inextricably part of 21st century diplomacy, entangled with new forms of soft and hard power and mobilised to soften the ‘new imperialisms’ of neoliberal interventions as they alter political and economic climates in countries such as Afghanistan
