In addressing why European Union (EU) policy in Afghanistan failed, this research has aimed to shed new light on the EU's external action. To do this, it has not used a traditional International Relations theory, but sought to challenge many of the working assumptions of approaches that prioritize presentism, ahistoricism, Eurocentrism and state- centrism. This has required a commitment to methodological pluralism. Guiding this research has been a sense that three key theoretical commitments not only matter, but that they can help explain the social world and in doing so identify why EU policy failed. The first, using Buzan and Little's framework, is that in trying to understand international relations, world history matters and can provide an important lens for looking at world politics today. Rather than accepting contemporary logics and structures, it is important to put them within a larger historical context and see how they developed in different place and at different times. This certainly had the benefit of allowing the chapters of this book to recontextualize Afghanistan and reject notions that it is in any way a ‘blank slate’. Notions that anywhere can be considered a tabula rasa do not just resonate with neocolonial ways of looking at the world, but as this book has shown, they have enormous potential to damage and endanger the world around us. The Taliban may well physically want to eradicate Afghanistan's pre- Islamic history, but Western powers should not commit the same mistake by eradicating history from their psychological consciousness. It is in this context that Chapter 1 necessarily challenged the profound misperception of Afghanistan as a ‘blank slate’, a perspective that disregards the rich tapestry of Afghan history and norms shaped over millennia. This fallacy has perpetuated a misunderstanding and underestimation of Afghanistan's complex sociopolitical fabric and its people's agency.

The second key theoretical commitment has been in explaining how norm circles, norms and practices help us explain the social world. This has not only been applied to Afghanistan, but as the narrative unfolded, as a point of entry for explaining EU, United States (US) and other actors’ actions at multiple levels of analysis.