The article applies the Althusserian concept of overdetermination to a contemporary case of urban restructuring in the global South. Since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the international aid industry has been using its capital city, Kabul, as a laboratory and launch pad for liberal policies and programmes to demonstrate that security, economic growth and democracy are mutually reinforcing and can therefore be achieved in conjunction. These interventions have resulted in fundamental structural changes in Kabul’s political economy that mimic processes of accumulation by dispossession in the urban global North. Formerly shaped by indigenous political activism and cautious democratic experimentation, Kabul today is a space of accelerated accumulation in the shadows of international peacebuilding.