Ahmad Moradi

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: This project examines the postwar lives of disabled Hazara Afghan veterans and their families in Iran, focusing on two generations of men: those who fought in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and those recruited into Iran-backed forces in Syria after 2011. With Wenner-Gren support, the researcher implemented Plan B and completed a productive year of remote and archival research. Through online and telephone interviews, life-history research, archival work, and engagement with Afghan diasporic networks in Berlin and Europe, Ahmad Moradi expanded the project both empirically and conceptually. He continued interviews with Afghan veterans and their families, developed new life-history material with a Berlin-based Afghan family whose grandfather fought in the Iran-Iraq War, and gained access to family albums and visual materials. He also redirected part of the research toward written and visual archives of the 1980s, allowing the project to situate present-day care struggles within a longer history of Afghan displacement, and marginal belonging in Iran and beyond. The research shows that care for disabled Afghan veterans is embedded in kinship networks, debt relations, gendered obligations and grammars of political suspicion. The project contributes to the non-humanitarian negotiations of care in non-western contexts, disability studies and anthropology of veteranhood.