An Exploratory Study of the Political Abuse of Women in Afghanistan (original) (raw)
Models and Realities of Afghan Womanhood: A Retrospective and Prospects
UNESCO, 2006
In order to conceptualise what human rights can signify for women in the dominantly rural society that is Afghanistan, it is necessary to understand the models and stereotypes available to them in recent history and how these have been reworked in every day life. Theirs is not an isolated situation occurring in a vacuum; it has to be understood in relation to the developments in the Indian sub-continent from the British Raj onwards as well as the spread of present-day Islamism. In the context of what may well be Asia's most tribal and patriarchal society, the resistance to Western modernization is unique in a country which could have been, alongside Turkey, at the avantgarde of progressive Muslim nations as early as in the 1920s. All efforts by reformist kings from the early 20th century onwards were doomed and when the communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women's rights after the April revolution of 1978, acute civil strife ensued. This generated full-scale war when their Soviet allies came to the rescue and the US, through their assistance to fundamentalist groups, turned this into the last conflagration of the Cold War.
The Women of Afghanistan: Past and Present Challenges
Journal of Social Science Studies, 2017
Women face tough challenges in developing countries which usually enforce strong traditional stereotypes. Afghanistan is a good example where women have experienced both radical and moderate changes. Some of the changes have ameliorated their position in society whereas for the most part the changes endured have kept them from fulfilling their potential roles in a traditional patriarchal structure. This article attempts to highlight the various fluctuations that have occurred in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, paying special attention to the period during and after the Soviet invasion of 1978. Afghan women possess legal rights which are on a par with other developed states but it is the implementation of these rights which leaves much to be desired. The impact of culture and history cannot be minimised when trying to explain the obstacles faced in improving Afghan women's rights.
Women's Rights In Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule 1996-2001 And 2021-2022: A Comparative Study
2022
The paper identifies issues of women's rights in Afghanistan. Before the Taliban female enjoy freedom and rights of equality but after the end of Soviet rule emergence of the Taliban with the Islamic edicts women faced threats and hardships in every aspect of life. The main purpose of this paper is to find the women's rights-related issues that are faced in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime and the research question is a comparison of the earlier status to the current regime. In the qualitative research, secondary sources provide knowledge of the past rule of the Taliban left an evil impact not only on the Afghan community but also on the international community that’s why in the second ruling power system by using the primary source see Taliban under probe tries to improve the condition of Women's rights but do not lessen the threats. Our main finding is concise as possible to minor differences related to earlier regimes. A female can protest for rights with the hope despite the fear of loss of life. The level of insecurity and inequality may be reduced with the help and favour of foreign countries.
Women in Afghanistan: A Historical Study
Afghanistan is a landlocked country with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, China, Iran and Pakistan as its neighbours. It is a small country in the benign protection of the Hindu Kush and the great Himalayas with its rugged hills and sturdy people who, till yesterday appeared to be leading a sleepy and indifferent existence under the tyrannical feudal dynasties. Afghanistan has remained geographically, religio-culturally and commercially intimately connected with the neighboring countries. The issue of gender has been utilized as an instrument to serve the centralized state‘s larger political agendas, rather than to meet the basic needs of the majority women. It is true that in both the 1964 and 1977 Afghan constitutions ,women and men were recognized as equal before the law and women were given equal rights and privileges, but in practice ,patriarchy and tribal social conduct continued to dominate gender related relationships.
2003
In this paper, through the history of women in Afghanistan, I want to locate the position of women in the future by lessons learnt from the past. Given Afghanistan's current situation of poverty, political disenfranchisement and social disarray, I argue that these very deficiencies could be maneuvered to favor the empowerment of women by redefining her role in the family and the community. Afghanistan's social development can only be ensured through democracy and the reduction of poverty, the success of both being assured through full participation of women, especially in rural Afghanistan. In this paper I would like to trace the history of women in Afghanistan for three main reasons. One, to show that women in Afghanistan were not always oppressed by fundamentalism as occurred under the Mujahideen and the Taliban. Second, to go back into history and reflect on regimes and politicians to show that women's issues were an integral part of national construction agendas even...
The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
Nations Development Fund for Women (merged into UNWOMEN in 2011) UNODC United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime USAID United States Agency for International Development WAW Women for Afghan Women ix Note on L anguage The official languages of Afghanistan-and those most widely spoken-are Dari (a dialect of Persian) and Pashto. Both contain a number of Arabic loanwords. For words that have become common in English, such as sharia, ulema, and mullah, I have used the established form. Words less common in English appear in italics throughout the text, with a brief explanation the first time they are used. xi Acknowled gments When carrying out this research, I benefitted from the support, insight, and inspiration of numerous people. I am deeply grateful to the Research Council of Norway for financially supporting this work through the grants Violence in the Post-Conflict State (project number 190119), Governance, Justice, and Gender in Afghanistan: Between Informal and Formal Dynamics (project number 199437) and Violence against Women and Criminal Justice in Afghanistan (project number 230315). Chr. Michelsen Institute, where I have been employed throughout this research, has been a great institutional home, and I wish to thank my colleagues there for their encouragement and help. My debt and sense of gratitude to Astri Suhrke for her advice, enthusiasm, mentoring, and great company are enormous. In more than one way, this project could never have been realized without her. Arne Strand first introduced me to Kabul and gave me the confidence to carry out fieldwork in Afghanistan again and again. Karin Ask provided invaluable suggestions at important junctures of this work. Deniz Kandiyoti has been an immensely generous, inspiring, and thorough supervisor, and I cannot thank her enough for agreeing to take on this role, for her many pieces of crucial advice, and for her close reading of my drafts. In Afghanistan, numerous people shared their time, knowledge and company. Above all, I want to thank Mohammad Jawad Shahabi. His research assistance during the first part of this work and our subsequent collaboration on what is now chapter 3 of this book have been invaluable. I remain immeasurably grateful for his insights, skills, and efforts over the years. In the early summer of 2012, another case of sexual abuse reached Afghan television screens and the international press. Lal Bibi, an eighteen-year-old nomad woman from the province of Kunduz, came forward in Afghan media recounting how, on May 17, 2012, she was seized by men linked to a local armed group. She was held captive for five days and sexually assaulted as revenge for her cousin's elopement with a woman from the family of one of the kidnappers. Lal Bibi's family declared to journalists that unless justice was done, they would have no option but to kill her. However, Afghanistan's women's right activists quickly mobilized in support, and pressure mounted on the government to arrest the perpetrators. But back in Kunduz, the man accused of the rape protested that no such thing had taken place. He argued that there had been an agreement of baad-a practice in which a woman or girl is given in marriage as a form of compensation for a crime or an affront. A mullah had married Lal Bibi to him just before intercourse, and "once the marriage contract is done, any sexual intercourse is not considered rape" (A. J. Rubin 2012). In present-day Afghanistan, this version of events did not necessarily exonerate him from having committed a crime. Women's rights activists pointed out that forced marriage was also an offense, according to Afghan law and particularly the new Elimination of Violence against Women law (EVAW law), which had become a cornerstone of gender activism in the country. Moreover, his attempt to justify his actions with reference to a framework of baad implicated others. A friend of mine, who happened to be in Kunduz on fieldwork at the time, told me upon his return that the elders who had sanctioned the kidnapping (as an appropriate redress for the affront to the honor of the eloped girl's father) VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS ANALY TICAL ENTRY POINT S This book is filled with people who sought in various ways to have their ideas about gender violence accepted by others. For some it was a matter of immediacy. trafficking in sex workers, sexual harassment, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, female foeticide and infanticide, early and forced marriage, honour killings and widowhood violations" (Merry 2009: 82). And as we will see later, the Afghan EVAW law decreed in 2009 listed many of these acts as violence and added a number of other acts more particular to Afghanistan, which many Afghan women considered a violation of their rights, entitlements, or persons, such as the cursing of a woman or even the denial of an existing familial or marital relationship that would absolve obligations toward a woman. 1 In other words, the Afghan EVAW law was developed at the intersection of transnational and national registers. As the global campaign against VAW moved to the center stage of international politics, it also, perhaps unsurprisingly, became entangled in existing global power structures. With the shift from national to global advocacy came a more professionalized, bureaucratic mode of operation, standardized programs and compliance mechanisms, and the arrival of international "VAW experts. " In an influential article, Kapur (2002) scrutinizes the political effects of this global VAW discourse, noting that it rose to international prominence through the obfuscation of the power relations positioning Westerners, white women, and feminists differently from ethnic minorities and women in the Global South. It constructed women of the Global South and nonwhite women who are subjected to violence or abuse as victims of their culture and in need of (outside) protection. Kapur argues that this effectively amounts to a kind of gender and cultural essentialism that cannot accommodate the different positions that nonwhite women and women in the Global South inhabit, or take into account the historically specific forms that violence against them assume. It is difficult to think of an example of this more glaring than Afghanistan since 2001. Western claims to "liberate Afghan women" while entangled in the geopolitical interests driving the war on terror, exhibited many of the traits that Kapur warns against. Afghan women were frequently represented as victims in need of outside saving, trapped in a backward state, and suffering what the West knew to be violence and abuse-violence that occurred as part of Islam or Afghan culture. Examining the employment and effects of such "victimisation rhetoric" (Kapur 2002) is integral to the analysis in this book, but a clarification nonetheless feels necessary. Stating that the book is about "violence against women" does not mean it places itself uncritically into the VAW discourse. I do not assume the existence of a fixed or absolute set of practices that await recognition as violence against women. This would suggest an endpoint of liberation and inevitably place countries along an axis of development or civilization, enabling the kind of global VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND BROADER FIELDS OF POWER As the discussion has already hinted at, definitions of and negotiations over violence against women are not just entry points to looking at gender relations. They also illuminate other fields of power. As Hajjar points out, struggles over women's rights are also contestations over jurisdiction and authority (2004). Attempts to make gender violence a public issue could signify an important shift in the demarcation between the private domain of family and kinship on one hand and public authorities on the other. For instance, if a rape case is adjudicated in a state court rather than settled between the families involved or by a local leader or kinship group that traditionally settles disputes, this expands (or attempts to expand) the Western powers played a fundamental role in structuring Afghan statehood-to the extent that international actors explicitly tasked themselves with the wholesale building of the Afghan state. With this in mind, it is far from certain that the power exercised in a government court-for instance, if an Afghan man is prosecuted for rape or wife beating-is that of the Afghan state. As I will discuss in some detail in the chapters that follow, the ways in which the Afghan state intervened in cases of gender violence was often underwritten, funded, and even designed by global, mostly Western actors, suggesting that the sovereign power exercised in Afghan courts was partly global. At the same time, the economic and political resources flowing from the international interventions often constituted opportunities for local actors to exercise and consolidate power in ways unintended by the international "state builders. " It makes sense, then, to understand sites of international peace-building interventions as "fields of power where sovereignty is constantly contested and negotiated among global, elite and local actors" (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008: 269). In this vein, challenges to and negations of the nation-state (the sovereign) in (post-)conflict settings are best conceived not as from below or above (that is, from local or global sources), but as parallel or alternative alignments that often are transnationally woven. In order to make sense of the ways the global, the national, and what might be termed the tribal are entangled in Afghanistan, I draw upon Saskia Sassen's concept of assemblages (Sassen 2008: 67; Heathershaw 2011). She argues that thinking in terms of assemblages allows us to appreciate that the global can be "dressed in the clothes of the national" (Sassen 2011). In other words, Sassen underlines how national institutional capabilities are reassembled to serve Yet despite the many ways...
Women's Rights in the Taliban Regime
International studies journal (ISJ), 2023
After twenty years of endeavor to equalize women's rights in the half-dead democracy of Afghanistan, the dream of equal rights for women in the Afghan society was destroyed by the arrival of the Taliban group. This group and its supporters have committed countless crimes during their rule in Afghanistan. In 2021, when this group comes to power, the women's experience of two decades ago will be repeated, and women will be deprived of their most basic rights. Like two decades ago, the Taliban removed the girls from social life by closing schools and imprisoning them at home. The recent actions of the Taliban against women include the following areas: exclusion from education, exclusion from work, exclusion from political activities, and restriction of activities in the public space, all these decrees and rulings against women's activities are from the source of Sharath and religious fatwas. The Taliban has been issued. In this research, we are looking at the influencing factors of the Taliban's thoughts on restricting the rights of women in the society of Afghanistan. In this research, we have compared the differences between the religious thoughts and beliefs of the Taliban, which are adapted from Islamic rulings, and the religious fatwa of the Taliban leaders with Islamic rulings.
Cognizance Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies
This research examines the status of women under the rule of the Taliban government in two different periods (1996–2001) and (2021–now) in a comparative manner, pointing out the similarities and differences between the Taliban's behaviour towards women in these two periods. Then the main reason for these differences is studied, and it focuses on testing the hypothesis that international pressures are the main factor for the changes in the Taliban's behaviour towards women.