In the aftermath of the Western intervention of 2001 in Afghanistan and the new politico-economic order that ensued, the unprecedented wave of returns from exile, the arrival of international development actors and the opening up of the media contributed to the burgeoning of a variety and multiplicity of foreign references, practices, and discourses generating new models of behavior. The interaction with and negotiation of Western development paradigms by Afghan women and men after 2001 has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years – particularly in urban settings. There has been less focus, however, on the ways in which the continued transformation of social relations in contemporary Afghan society is affected by forms of interaction with other sets of references, including from neighboring cultural environments, and the ways in which these references are shaped and processed. Building on 32 months of in-country field research (2015-2019) on processes of cultural transfer through return migration from Iran to Afghanistan, the paper examines how exposure to new ideas, values, elements of lifestyle and behaviors while in exile contributes to a process of re-definition of identity and, ultimately, attitudes toward social norms, particularly as they relate to gender identities and roles. Specifically, it looks into how men and women who grew up in Iran and returned to Afghanistan in the years following the change of regime in 2001 position themselves in the new socio-cultural order through processes of association, negotiation and differentiation. The analysis focuses on narratives by and about return migrants from Iran drawn from semi-directed interviews and participant observation in the urban centers of Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif, as well as textual analysis from media and social media sources. Two tropes in discourses surrounding gender in Afghanistan are explored: the notion of ‘honor’, and that of ‘freedom’, attempting to assess how these two notions are mobilized to delineate or subvert boundaries of identity. It shows the diversity of ways in which these notions are subject to interpretation and produce a wide spectrum of shifting syntheses with paradigmatic discourses on tradition, Islam, and national identity.