Where are the international allies of Afghan women?

Women in Afghanistan: a call for action

Bread, Work, Freedom! The Urgent Call for Action and Accountability in Afghanistan 

This article examines the impact of Taliban policies on women’s education in Afghanistan, focusing on the severe restrictions imposed since their return to power in 2021. Using a qualitative methodology, the study analyzes secondary data sources, including reports from human rights organizations, government documents, and educational statistics, to assess the implications of these restrictions. Findings reveal that the Taliban’s policies constitute gender apartheid and violate international human rights standards, causing significant setbacks in women’s educational achievements. The systematic denial of education has led to widespread mental health issues among Afghan women and girls, exacerbating anxiety, fear, and hopelessness. Moreover, these restrictions have profound socio-economic consequences, perpetuating cycles of poverty and hindering national development. The study underscores the urgent need for the international community to support Afghan women’s education through targeted policies, humanitarian aid, and diplomatic engagement with local women’s rights groups. Ultimately, access to education is crucial not only as a fundamental human right but also as a cornerstone for sustainable development and gender equality in Afghanistan. Continued advocacy and research are essential to understanding the long-term effects of educational denial and developing effective strategies for resistance and resilience among Afghan women.

The global community was alarmed at what will become the human rights situation of girls and women in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the USA from the polity and the political ascendancy of the Taliban government in 2021. As expected, Afghan girls and women have been facing severe violations of human rights since the Taliban government gained political power; citing cultural relativism. This cultural relativist excuse of the Taliban government has however been countered by the universality of human rights that Afghan girls and women are entitled to certain freedoms by virtue of being humans. The UN Women, among other human rights vanguards, have been serving as a platform to provide safe haven for women against the violations of human rights by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Understanding that gender discrimination situation is what UN Women aims to address falls within the constructivist contention of relativity and universality of human rights, this study draws on secondary sources of data to examine the context of interplay between ethnicity, culture, politics and human rights of girls and women in Afghanistan. The study also interrogates counter-narratives of the Afghan people against the Taliban’s position and provides a clear argument of how UN Women has been able to provide support for Afghan women and girls. The study argues that UN Women, despite the Taliban’s unapologetic abuse and violations of women and girls rights, is able to provide support for women and girls who suffer gender discrimination in Afghanistan. The study concludes that the cultural relativist excuse of the Taliban does not, in its entirety, represent the cultural norms and attitudes of the Afghan societies. Gender apartheid was not a consistent order of the multi-ethnic configuration in Afghanistan and the political leaders who have ruled at different times had different policy dispositions to women.

Human rights in the face of global challenges are becoming increasingly important as the world becomes ever more interconnected. The global community is facing a multitude of challenges, from climate change, wars and displacement to political instability and economic inequality. In response to these issues, the international community has renewed its focus on human rights. This renewed focus has led to an increased emphasis on the protection and promotion of fundamental rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. At the same time, global challenges threaten to undermine the progress made in protecting human rights. For example, the displacement caused by climate change has the potential to create conditions in which human rights abuses can flourish. Similarly, economic inequalities can lead to social exclusion and discrimination. In order to protect and promote human rights in the face of these global challenges, governments must work in partnership with non-governmental organizations, civil society groups, and individuals. This collaboration should focus on strengthening existing human rights laws and creating new ones to tackle the issues of climate change, displacement, and economic inequality. In addition, governments should ensure that everyone has access to the justice system.
 
 Received: 05 May 2022 / Accepted: 18 May 2023 / Published: 20 May 2023

Jalalzai, Zubeda, and David Jefferess, eds. 2011. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building. Durham: Duke University Press. $79.95 hc. $22.95 sc. 232 pp.Representing disciplines from history to cultural studies, this essay compilation is among the first sustained attempts at tracing Afghanistan's integration within the post-2001 world order from a humanities perspective. Its concerns give the work relevance beyond a restricted geographical setting; its interdisciplinary scope has kept most contributions accessible to general audiences; and the theoretically-framed introduction and conclusion orient the work for scholars. It is pedagogically useful for introducing themes in critical theory surrounding post-2001 globality, while its conceptual scope is its value for Afghan studies as a field.The editors' introduction frames the essays in a post-2001, globalized Afghan national space: the Afghan state is continuously constituted largely by international interests and institutions, while Afghanistan's 'national' existence as a project for the 'international community' has played an ongoing role in the rhetorical and institutional consolidation of that 'community' in specific directions. Influenced especially by Hardt and Negri, the editors argue that driving this dialectic is a new order, a global right . . . premised on interdependence, connectedness and commonality, but requir[ing] surveillance, coercion, and enforcement (7). Meanwhile, Imre Szeman's concluding essay demarcates this volume's stakes. Just as it traces Afghanistan's partial, subordinated integration into the international community, the volume aims to habilitate knowledge about into critical theory, to tip debate away from terms established by area 'experts' and policy and security narratives. Szeman situates the volume as public intervention via the carefully considered forum of academic humanities-construed here as a zone of public engagement that is nonetheless somewhat insulated from shifting hegemonic public discourses.For readers with little area background, the two chapters following the introduction are designed to offer political-economic and cultural-historical context on Afghanistan's place in the world after and before 2001. Nigel Gibson's It's the Opium, Stupid addresses much more than opium, and asks how Afghanistan's interaction with the world economy has patterned Afghan livelihoods and ecology as well as ideology and power politics. While contemporary may not entirely be a monocrop (41) narco-economy, the essay rightly emphasizes the dark side (37) of globalization, and the violence it involves, as far more crucial than the international community's 'official' actions in articulating Afghanistan's economy with the world's. Expanding the historical scale, Rodney J. Steward's Afghanistan in a Globalized World presents a mostly standard narrative of the Afghan state since the nineteenth century.The remainder of the volume provides a unique 'kaleidoscopic' cultural history of the world in over the past ten years. Altaf Ullah Khan, in Afghan Beat, describes ambivalence among Pakistani Pukhtoon, English-language journalists who function as intermediaries between everyday vernacular representation and media. Khan's agent-centric account lends welcome dynamism to a discussion of local cultural debates and change, while still emphasizing inequality and hegemonic processes. The next selections, by Gwen Bergner (Veiled Motives) and Maliha Chishti and Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims (Transnational Feminism and the Women's Rights Agenda in Afghanistan), mesh neatly. Bergner traces metropolitan discourses on Afghan women's liberation, reading popular feminist representations alongside American nationalism and militarism, while Chishti and Farhoumand-Sims inquire how those discourses, among others, move through institutions on the ground in Afghanistan, intersecting with local struggles. …

Introduction Daffodil Day, usually held in spring, raises funds for cancer awareness and research using this symbol of hope. On that day, people who donate money to this good cause are usually given a yellow daffodil pin to wear. When I lived in Auckland, New Zealand, on the last Friday in August most people walking around the city centre proudly wore a cheerful yellow flower. So many people generously participated in this initiative that one almost felt obliged to join the cause in order to wear the ‘uniform’ – the daffodil pin – as everyone else did on that day. To donate and to wear a daffodil is the social expectation, and operating in social environment people often endeavour to meet the expectation by doing the ‘appropriate things’ defined by societies or communities. After all, who does not like to receive a beam of acceptance and appreciation from a fellow daffodil bearer in Auckland’s Queen Street? States in international society are no different. In some ways, states wear ‘uniforms’ while executing domestic and foreign affairs just as human beings do within their social groups. States develop the understandings of desirable behaviour from the international community with which they interact and identify. They are ‘socialised’ to act in line with the expectations of international community. These expectations are expressed in the form of international norms, a prescriptive set of ideas about the ‘appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 891). Motivated by this logic of appropriateness, states that comply with certain international norms in world politics justify and undertake actions that are considered appropriate for their identities. This essay starts with examining how international norms can be spread to different countries through the process of ‘state socialisation’ (how the countries are ‘talked into’ wearing the ‘uniform’). Second, the essay investigates the idea of ‘cultural match’: how domestic actors comply with an international norm by interpreting and manipulating it according to their local political and legal practices (how the countries wear the ‘uniform’ differently). Lastly, the essay probes the current international normative community and the liberal values embedded in major international norms (whether states would continue wearing the ‘uniform’). International Norms and State Socialisation: Why Do States Wear the ‘Uniforms’? Norm diffusion is related to the efforts of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ using various platforms to convince a critical mass of states to embrace new norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 895-896). Early studies of norm diffusion tend to emphasise nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as norm entrepreneurs and advocates, such as Oxfam and its goal of reducing poverty and hunger worldwide (Capie 638). In other empirical research, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) were shown to serve as ‘norm teachers,’ such as UNESCO educating developing countries the value of science policy organisations (Finnemore 581-586). Additionally, states and other international actors can also play important roles in norm diffusion. Powerful states with more communication resources sometimes enjoy advantages in creating and promoting new norms (Florini 375). For example, the United States and Western European countries have often been considered as the major proponents of free trade. Norm emergence and state socialisation in a normative community often occurs during critical historical periods, such as wars and major economic downturns, when international changes and domestic crises often coincide with each other (Ikenberry and Kupchan 292). For instance, the norm entrepreneurs of ‘responsible power/state’ can be traced back to the great powers (mainly the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) and their management of international order at the end of WWII (see Bull). With their negotiations and series of international agreements at the Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conference in the 1940s, these great powers established a post-World War international society based on the key liberal values of international peace and security, free trade, human rights, and democracy. Human beings are not born to know what appropriate behaviour is; we learn social norms from parents, schools, peers, and other community members. International norms are collective expectations and understanding of how state governments should approach their domestic and foreign affairs. States ‘learn’ international norms while socialising with a normative community. From a sociological perspective, socialisation summarises ‘how and to what extent diverse individuals are meshed with the requirement of collective life’ at the societal level (Long and Hadden 39). It mainly consists of the process of training and shaping newcomers by the group members and the social adjustment of novices to the normative framework and the logic of appropriateness (Long and Hadden 39). Similarly, social psychology defines socialisation as the process in which ‘social organisations influence the action and experience of individuals’ (Gold and Douvan 145). Inspired by sociology and psychology, political scientists consider socialisation to be the mechanism through which norm entrepreneurs persuade other actors (usually a norm novice) to adhere to a particular prescriptive standard (Johnston, “Social State” 16). Norm entrepreneurs can change novices’ behaviour by the methods of persuasion and social influence (Johnston, “Treating International Institutions” 496-506). Socialisation sometimes demands that individual actors should comply with organisational norms by changing their interests or preferences (persuasion). Norm entrepreneurs often attempt to construct an appealing cognitive frame in order to persuade the novices (either individuals or states) to change their normative preferences or adopt new norms. They tend to use language that can ‘name, interpret and dramatise’ the issues related to the emerging norm (Finnemore and Sikkink 987). As a main persuasive device, ‘framing’ can provide a singular interpretation and appropriate behavioural response for a particular situation (Payne 39). Cognitive consistency theory found in psychology has suggested the mechanism of ‘analogy’, which indicates that actors are more likely to accept new ideas that share some similarities to the extant belief or ideas that they have already accepted (see Hybel, ch. 2). Based on this understanding, norm entrepreneurs usually frame issues in a way that can associate and resonate with the shared value of the targeted novices (Payne 43). For example, Finnemore’s research shows that when it promoted the creation of state science bureaucracies in the 1960s, UNESCO associated professional science policy-making with the appropriate role of a modern state, which was well received by the post-war developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia (Finnemore 565-597). Socialisation can also emanate actors’ pro-norm behaviour through a cost-benefit calculation made with social rewards and punishments (social influence). A normative community can use the mechanism of back-patting and opprobrium to distribute social reward and punishment. Back-patting – ‘recognition, praise and normative support’ – is offered for a novice’s or member’s cooperative and pro-norm behaviour (Johnston, “Treating International Institutions” 503). In contrast, opprobrium associated with status denial and identity rejection can create social and psychological costs (Johnston 504). Both the reward and punishment grow in intensity with the number of co-operators (Johnston 504). A larger community can often create more criticism towards rule-breakers, and thus greatly increase the cost of disobedience. For instance, the lack of full commitment from major powers, such as China, the United States, and some other OECD countries, has arguably made global collective action towards mitigating climate change more difficult, as the cost of non-compliance is relatively low. While being in a normative environment, novice or emerging states that have not yet been socialised into the international community can respond to persuasion and social influence through the processes of identification and mimicking. Social psychology indicates that when one actor accepts persuasion or social influence based on its desire to build or maintain a ‘satisfying self-defining relationship’ to another actor, the mechanism of identification starts to work (Kelman 53). Identification among a social group can generate ‘obligatory’ behaviour, where individual states make decisions by attempting to match their perceptions of ‘who they are’ (national identity) with the expectation of the normative community (Glodgeier and Tetlock 82). After identifying with the normative community, a novice state would then mimic peer states’ pro-norm behaviour in order to be considered as a qualified member of the social group. For example, when the Chinese government was deliberating over its ratification of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in 2003, a Ministry of Environmental Protection brief noted that China should ratify the Protocol as soon as possible because China had always been a country ‘keeping its word’ in international society, and non-ratification would largely ‘undermine China’s international image and reputation’ (Ministry of Environmental Protection of PRC). Despite the domestic industry’s disagreement with entering into the Protocol, the Chinese government’s self-identification as a ‘responsible state’ that performs its international promises and duties played an important role in China’s adoption of the international norm of biosafety. Domestic Salience of International Norms: How Do States Wear the ‘Uniforms’ Differently? Individual states do not accept international norms passively; instead, state governments often negotiate and interact with domestic a

Following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, they abolished and dismantled the Afghanistan legal system and institutional structures. Over the course of nearly four years, the Taliban unleashed systematic and widespread discrimination against women by issuing over one hundred edicts and by passing the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice law, which imposed restrictions on women’s fundamental human rights. This article has two functions: first, to provide background on the Taliban’s discriminatory policies against women; second, by applying Margret Davies’s concept of ‘Feminism and the Flat Law Theory’ as a horizontal approach to international law, this article concludes that the Afghan women’s movement could significantly influence the trajectory of international human rights law by reshaping and expanding global legal discourse to challenge cultural relativism and advancing a movement for the international codification of gender apartheid to hold the Taliban accountable.

Gender has always remained an alarming concern for patriarchal power discourse and thereby has been omitted from securing an important place of discussion in parity to the world’s economic, political, social, and cultural crisis. Recent control of the Taliban’s rule on Afghanistan has reflected and repeated the historical totalitarian sense of dictatorship and gender apartheid; so that, the rule of ‘phallus’ in controlling, re-presenting, and depicting the lives of all women is started. Alarms of ‘girls at risk’, ‘women being abolished from professional spaces’ soon emerged with the Taliban’s rule. The news and report portrayed how the Taliban treated women as ‘objects’ and machines of ‘reproduction’, where the vaginal authority is smashed with ‘legitimate’ phallus, and thus the vaginal bodies turn into the ‘sex-slaves’ and servants to serve the Taliban rulers. Power has a crucial role in ordering the central tendency of ‘bodies’; the Taliban target is to have the power; a power that is allowing countries like China, the U.S.A to dominate. It is important to note more than Pakistan, it is China’s support (secretly) that is permitting the Taliban to accelerate. Gender and Power dynamics always altered domains of inheritance and are associated and inclined more deeply towards the white-cis-heterosexual-phallus (gender) in comparison to any other. Women as subjects have always lacked power because restrictions and marking on the accessibility to ‘gain power’ were blurred. Politics and phallus are complementary power dynamics in operation that uses Gender as an operative tool to create ‘crises’ for one and support for the other. Where the power-play within the phallogocentric symbolic order creates the suffering veiled. Hence, my paper aims to present the deplorable condition of women under the Taliban’s rule and make a comparison of their position before 1996 and after that till the present.

Today, one must state that most women in Afghanistan find themselves in a similar repressive situation as during the Taliban regime. Besides some initial positive developments in the fields of education, political participation, health care and employment thanks to the armed intervention of the international community, not many aspects have improved in a substantial manner for most Afghan women and girls. According to several observers and human rights organisations, women in Afghanistan continue to be among the worst off within and beyond South Asia. Despite relevant commitments of the former Karzai government, women are facing all kinds of social atrocities, political limitations and sufferings from traditional practices, which are neither in line with the Afghan constitution, nor with national and international laws. The situation further deteriorated after the withdrawal of the bulk of international troops, which paved the path for the comeback of the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalist groups, as well as the growing influence of religious clerics within the Afghan state and society. Having this in mind, the article attempts to shed some light on the most significant trajectories contributing to the worsening of the status of Afghan women.

Patriarchy, the Taleban, and politics of public space in Afghanistan

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule was widely publicized in the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects for Afghan women designed and imposed by external organizations. Building on embodiment and performance theory, this evocative ethnography describes Afghan women's responses to social anxieties about identity that have emerged as a result of the military occupation. Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground studies since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Julie Billaud introduces readers to daily life in Afghanistan through portraits of women targeted by international aid policies. Examining encounters between international experts in gender and transitional justice, Afghan civil servants and NGO staff, and women unaffiliated with these organizations, Billaud unpacks some of the paradoxes that arise from competing understandings of democracy and rights practices. Kabul Carnival reveals the ways in which the international community's concern with the visibility of women in public has ultimately created tensions and constrained women's capacity to find a culturally legitimate voice.

The purpose of the study is to analyze and adapt the theoretical and methodological problems of the cluster theory of agro-industrial integration and multifunctionality to the situation in the agro-industrial complex and rural territories of Russia as conditions for their competitive and sustainable development. The objectives of the study include the analysis, refinement and development of a system of categories that ensure the implementation of the goal and objectives of the study, the identification and scientific justification of the main areas of clustering in the rural territories of the Russian Federation. The ideas of foreign and domestic researchers of the role of clusters in the socio-economic development of territories, the need to apply the concept of multifunctionality of the economy in cluster management, reproducing not only goods, but also public goods, are summarized and adapted to the goal of research; the role of human capital in the formation of competitive and sustainable clusters, which have become widespread and enshrined in the international scientific community. Based on the generalization of the theoretical and practical provisions of cluster theory and the concept of multifunctionality of agriculture, a methodology is scientifically justified that allows developing the directions of cluster theory and the theory of multifunctionality in applying to solving the problem of effective clustering management and forming clusters that ensure the sustainable and competitive development of rural territories of Russia in the face of global challenges and threats. The application of a systematic approach made it possible to scientifically justify the priority areas of state policy for the formation of sustainable and competitive rural development based on the application of cluster theory and the concept of multifunctionality. As part of the study, a critical terminological and expert analysis was carried out on the material of current policy documents, regulatory acts of the Russian Federation, publications of foreign and domestic authors. The author’s interpretation of the category «cluster,» «clustering» is justified. Essence and socio-economic content of agro-industrial clusters are considered. The main trends and factors of clustering development in agro-industrial production are identified. The directions of clustering in the rural territories of the Russian Federation have been identified and scientifically justified. The need for a more active development of the concept of multifunctionality of the socio-natural-economic space (SPEP) of the agro-industrial complex (AIC) and rural territories (ST) together with the problems of the development of agro-industrial integration of rural territories has been proved. The main result of the study was to confirm the author’s hypothesis and gain new knowledge that in order to implement an effective state policy to increase the sustainable and competitive development of agribusiness and rural areas in the face of global challenges and threats, it is necessary to develop and apply a cluster theory of agro-industrial integration and multifunctionality with the definition of the main directions of clustering. The conclusion is justified that the competitive and sustainable development of agribusiness and rural areas can be effectively shaped and supported through the application of strategic management. The practical result of the study, which can be applied in management activities, was the proposed methodological approaches to the implementation of strategic management of the sustainable development of agribusiness and rural areas, the model of managing reserves for the sustainable and competitive development of agribusiness and rural areas.

Gendered narratives are political narratives that frequently frame decisions to go to war or broker peace. Such geopolitical narratives both enable the protection of women's rights and violate them. Women's rights, specifically, have been used as a rhetorical device by security policymakers to persuade people of the urgency and legitimacy of foreign intervention or withdrawal. We explore how gendered, geopolitical narratives work to construct understandings of political reality and delimit foreign policy options, and how counter-narratives contest them, transforming the available policy options. Drawing on narrative analysis frameworks, we examine the shifting narratives invoking “Afghan women” that facilitated the change in US policy on Afghanistan between 2018 and 2021 and the consequent return of the Taliban. In response to the US withdrawal, we investigate the counter-narrative of Afghan women that emphasizes universal human rights, inclusive peace, and international recognition of the situation of “gender apartheid.” We argue that counter-narratives supported by political strategies are an effective instrument for empowering marginalized women and legitimizing their activism that protests the continuation of war against women despite the end of military war.

Afghanistan, War Crisis, and Gender Apartheid: A Comment on Afghan Women as War Victims and Nullified ‘Objects’ of Human Rights.