Internationalized governance in civil war: the Afghanistan land grabs (2001-2015) - Economic predation in Afghanistan is not the product of a supposed national culture or a specific relationship to the state. Instead, it stems from networks of Afghan politicians and the military opportunistically profiting from the system of internationalized governance that integrated actors of Western intervention with the Hamid Karzai regime. Afghan politico-military entrepreneurs exploited the inflationist, speculative trends in land ownership that began with the land resource disembedding of the 1960s and 70s and that accelerated with the civil war starting in 1979. Karzai’s regime and its foreign supporters are at the core of this new, unregulated political economy that let a small group of Afghans monopolize international aid and land revenues. The members of this group enriched themselves outside any circuits of reciprocity. They sequestered their gains, minus paltry amounts doled out to hangers-on, outside the country. This dynamic under a system of internationalized governance was unprecedented for the Afghan state, which, since the late nineteenth century, had ruled by regulating the redistribution of land.