The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan

OPGP 4 – THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND RECONSTRUCTION IN AFGHANISTAN
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SUMMARY
The central objective of this paper is to put the discussion of women’s rights in Afghanistan in the context of the
multiple transitions entailed by the process of post-conflict 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 growth). These transformations do not occur in a social vacuum
but build upon existing societal arrangements that condition and limit the range of available opportunities.
The first section contextualizes current attempts at securing women’s rights in the troubled history of state-building
and state-society relations in Afghanistan. The latter were marked by tensions between a rentier state bolstered
by foreign subsidies, which had a relatively weak engagement with society, and a rural hinterland that
both resisted the incursions of the state and attempted to represent tribal interests within it. Attempts at modernization,
including the expansion of women’s rights, were instigated by a male state elite whose bids to centralize
power were thwarted at various junctures. The issue of women’s rights was used as a bargaining counter
in contests between social forces whose geopolitical entanglements produced sharp swings of the pendulum
between extremes such as the Soviet-backed socialist experiment under the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) and the Islamist policies of the Pakistani-backed Taliban. However, in a context where the
state’s interface with local communities, whether in terms of the legal framework, revenue collection or service
delivery, was always limited, attempts to analyse women’s rights with reference only to government policies
suffer from serious shortcomings. It is, rather, to the profound transformations brought about by years of protracted
conflict that one must look for a better appraisal of obstacles to and opportunities for more genderequitable
development in Afghanistan.
The second section discusses the implications of the far-reaching changes in social relations brought about by
years of war and displacement following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A predominantly rural country
whose population achieved relatively self-sufficient livelihoods was transformed into a fragmented polity
where a significant proportion of the economy is based on illicit, criminalized networks of trade in drugs (opium
poppy, in particular) and commodities such as timber and emeralds, smuggling of goods and human trafficking.
The central argument put forward in this section is that routine violations of women’s rights in Afghanistan
are determined by analytically distinct but overlapping and mutually reinforcing sets of influences: the dynamics
of gendered disadvantage, the erosion of local livelihoods and growing poverty, the criminalization of the
economy, and insecurity due to the predations of armed groups and factions. Particular combinations of new
pressures (such as poverty, indebtedness and predation by local strongmen) and existing practices (such as the
early marriage of girls against the payment of brideprice) create outcomes that may easily be misidentified as
unmediated expressions of local “culture”, thus detracting critical attention from the full nexus of influences that
deepen the vulnerability of girls and women.
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