The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan

THE LEGACIES OF CONFLICT: IS THERE A GENDER SUB-TEXT?
the years of exile, and is continuing to play a role in lobbying for women’s rights. New economic pressures have
placed some women in breadwinning roles. Many have suffered the loss of male providers. Others have accessed
jobs through contact with international aid agencies that provide new avenues of employment. Whereas previously
the government was the principal employer of women in urban areas, aid-agency efforts to extend
services to women at the rural and provincial levels have expanded the opportunities for educated provincial
women to seek employment as health providers, educators or project staff (Azarbaijani-Moghaddam 2004).
Although the longer-term impact of these changes is difficult to assess, the advantages of harnessing women’s
income-earning power in the service of household survival are lost on neither urban nor rural communities.
The problem, however, is that women’s low levels of education and skill, their restricted mobility and lack of
access to markets make their income-generating activities subject to exploitative relationships that offer
limited potential for empowerment.
Currently, routine violations of women’s human rights in Afghanistan are over-determined by independent but
partially overlapping and mutually reinforcing sets of influences: the gendered disadvantages inherent in the
marriage, inheritance and daily social practices of various ethnic communities are aggravated by the loss of the
cushioning effects of family ties and obligations, which have been eroded through poverty and displacement.
When the most vulnerable are left to fend for themselves, they become easy prey to forms of exploitation ranging
from debt peonage to human trafficking. The dynamics of gendered disadvantage, the erosion of local livelihoods,
the criminalization of the economy and insecurity at the hands of armed groups and factions are analytically
distinct phenomena, yet their effects combine seamlessly to produce extreme forms of female vulnerability. Issues
of gender justice and equity cannot be adequately addressed unless they are put firmly in the context of the
multiple transitions Afghanistan must undergo in the process of reconstruction: a security transition (from war
to peace), a political transition (to the formation of a legitimate and effective state) and a socioeconomic transition
(from a “conflict” economy to sustainable economic growth). In what follows, an attempt will be made to
evaluate the efforts made to address these issues in the context of institution-building and peace-consolidation
efforts initiated after the Bonn Agreement in 2001.
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