Weaving Borders, Mapping Place: Afghan War Rugs of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989)

Abstract

Early Afghan war rugs delineate place through their pictorial design, embedding spatial memory into the tactile surface of the woven field. Emerging in the wake of the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s, these rugs integrate modern war iconography of tanks, helicopters, and maps into a medium historically tied to regional identity, spiritual practice, and craft. While earlier scholarship has often read these rugs as commodities of war tourism, this thesis moves beyond this interpretation to foreground the rug as a placemaking device, one that asserts territory and agency through mapping techniques. Afghan war rugs frame and define space on a land that has largely been considered placeless, at times porous and seemingly unknown. Through their borders, these rugs resist the geopolitical narratives that have long reduced Afghanistan to a war-torn frontier. The border serves as a framing device, structuring the rug’s design while simultaneously asserting territorial presence. Whether following a prescribed cartoon or improvising patterns, the weaver actively engages in “border-ing,” exercising cartographic agency by embedding personal, traditional, and political motifs into the rug. This research interrogates how early Afghan war rugs engage in spatial representation against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war from 1979-1989. From historical colonial mapping projects to Soviet and American cartographic investigations, Afghanistan’s borders have long been sites of surveillance, resource extraction, and imperial ambition. Yet, in contrast to these external mapping practices, the war rug’s design is a resistant act of placemaking. Examining the rug as both artifact and map, this study explores how Afghan weavers reclaim their landscapes through rug making, embedding memory and materiality into woven form.