Welcome to the emirate: the Taliban’s reinvention of tourism in post-conflict Afghanistan

This article conceptualises tourism in post-2021 Afghanistan as a technology of authoritarian governance embedded in longer histories of state-managed mobility and selective openness. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and Bamiyan, including interviews with officials and tourism operators, it traces how the Taliban’s tourism revival is organised through inherited bureaucratic infrastructures, informal networks and pragmatic accommodations between ideological authority and market practice. Building on theories of authoritarian managed openness and adaptive resilience, the analysis shows how tourism structures controlled encounters with foreign visitors, stages performances of stability and normalcy, and channels scarce foreign currency under conditions of sanctions and isolation. Everyday improvisation by guides, entrepreneurs and officials sustains the sector through flexible, extra-institutional arrangements. Afghanistan thus demonstrates how tourism in fragile authoritarian settings operates as symbolic statecraft and a selectively managed form of international engagement that stabilises and reproduces existing power relations.