Raising her voice : Afghan women’s narratives of women’s rights, democracy, peace and security in the us occupation of Afghanistan (2001-2021)
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis contributes to understanding why the US mission to ‘save’ Afghan women failed to bring peace, security, democracy and women’s rights to Afghanistan. Focusing on the period of the US-led occupation from 2001 to 2021, the study examines the intersection of women's rights activism and post-conflict peacebuilding in Afghanistan, analysing how gendered approaches to peacebuilding and counterinsurgency affected Afghan women and how women themselves sought to ensure their rights and participation in transitional peacebuilding and democratization processes. The central argument of this thesis is that women’s rights were instrumentalised throughout the war, initially to provide justifications for the invasion of Afghanistan and later through instrumentalist approaches to gendered counterinsurgency and liberal peacebuilding. To support this argument, the thesis draws on an original database comprising narratives from 200 Afghan women, delving into the impact of the 20-year NATO occupation on women and their responses to it. This research is a timely and significant intervention into debates on Muslim women's agency and activism, as well as contributing more widely to understanding the gendered consequences of liberal peacebuilding within the context of foreign military intervention. In contrast to the principles outlined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which emphasise the inclusion of women in all aspects of peacebuilding, this study reveals that women were consistently excluded from peace talks and post-conflict reconstruction. Consequently, women’s rights were commodified and traded away in peace negotiations by the US in return for ‘peace and security’ and a swift exit from Afghanistan, as activists had predicted they would. Furthermore, rather than fulfilling its professed objective of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, the US facilitated undemocratic power seizures by fundamentalist ‘warlords’ responsible for human rights abuses, which, together with the ongoing military occupation, paradoxically strengthened resistance to women's rights reforms and generated new forms of insecurity and violence against women. Consequently, the notion of ‘saving Afghan women’ was an unattainable dream and an illusion. Neither peace nor security as defined by women was achieved for them, as their demands for a justice and human rights were marginalised in favour of a heavy-handed liberal ‘women’s empowerment’ agenda. In contrast to the rhetoric of ‘saving Afghan women’, peace and security as defined by women, was not just a distant dream but a fallacy. Against this background, dominant knowledge of Afghan/Muslim women’s agency often falls into one of two binary categories; either ‘misery research’ or ‘dignity research’ (Moghadam, 2005a, pp. 156-7). However, this thesis argues for an intersectional feminist theoretical framework of Muslim women’s agency that goes beyond binary representations of Afghan/Muslim women, which are either Orientalist and as either passive, oppressed victims of Islamic patriarchy or in an over-celebratory expression of Muslim women’s agential capacity that glosses over the brutalities of gender oppression stemming from local patriarchal norms. The findings demonstrate that Afghan women deployed various strategies to pursue their human rights and participation in peacebuilding processes. With varying degrees of success, they attempted to carve out a space from which to advocate for their rights on their own terms whilst resisting and negotiating the forces of both ‘imperial feminism’ and Islamic fundamentalism in a context of ongoing conflict, insecurity, poverty, displacement and pervasive violence against women.
Author: Aaliyah Hussain
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7052284177