This analysis summarizes and reflects on the following research: Rivas, A-M., & Safi, M. (2022). Women and the Afghan peace and reintegration process. International Affairs, 98(1), 85–104. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab227
Talking Points
In the context of the 2010-2014 Afghan peace process:
- Despite international calls for women’s inclusion, Afghan women have played a very limited role in the peace process—highlighting the lack of importance assigned to women’s experiences by both Afghan society and the international community.
- Interviews and focus groups with a diverse cross-section of Afghan women reveal that women hold diverse views about what peace means and how peace should be attained.
- Tensions between rural and urban women influenced how women and women’s issues were represented in the peace talks, revealing important questions about accountability and transparency.
- The marginalization of women in Afghanistan is the outcome of both domestic and international forces that have effectively set Afghan women up to fail, with more powerful actors undermining their contributions and silencing their perspectives.
Key Insight for Informing Practice
- In light of the failure of war to ensure and protect women’s rights, a feminist foreign policy offers an alternative approach to supporting global human rights without the threat of violence.
Summary
Afghanistan has had a long history of international intervention and war—and, consequently, numerous attempts at creating a lasting peace. A narrow understanding of Afghan women’s experiences helped justify the U.S. invasion in 2001, along with years of war and occupation that followed. Prominent stereotypes within international research and policy discourse have overlooked the “complexity of [Afghan] women’s lives, diminished their intellectual contributions and consigned their voices to inaudibility,” while “providing little insight into the everyday intersectional realities of Afghan women.” The stereotyping of Afghan women is a “manifestation[ ] of patriarchy” and a reflection of hierarchical knowledge production that “flatten[s] the subjectivities of [Global South] women.” Althea-Maria Rivas and Mariam Safi challenge the stereotyping and silencing of Afghan women by exploring the ways that women participated (or were excluded from participating) in the High Peace Council and the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) from 2010 to 2014. They argue that both policy and research work on Afghanistan must “do more to recognize the varied ways in which intersectionality shapes [women’s] perspectives and their relationships to one another and to the social and political world around them.” Failing to recognize the complexity of women’s lives results in negative outcomes for women and for the peace process overall.
| Patriarchy: |
“[A] political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” hooks, b. (2004). Understanding patriarchy. In The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love (pp. 17-34). New York, NY: Atria Books. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf |
| Intersectionality: | A framework (developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw) for understanding how multiple social identities can intersect in particular ways to create distinct experiences of oppression. |
Rivas and Safi combine findings from three consultative research projects on women and peace conducted across eight provinces in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014. The first research project conducted 19 focus group discussions and ten semi-structured interviews with 106 women around the country. The remaining projects were organized by the Afghanistan Justice Organization in Kabul: a half-day seminar to identify challenges to women’s participation in the formal peace process and a round-table discussion on the role of women in Afghanistan following the 2014 NATO drawdown. Both initiatives were attended by members of the Afghanistan parliament, the ministries of defense and interior affairs, civil society (including Afghan women working in international NGOs), and the media.
Despite international calls for women’s inclusion, Afghan women have played a very limited role in the peace process—highlighting the lack of importance assigned to women’s experiences by both Afghan society and the international community. When women are included, they are exclusively elite women who are highly educated or highly visible in government or civil society. The result is a “diminished understanding of the complexity of women’s engagement with peace processes in Afghanistan [that] does not interrogate the importance of their multiple realities rooted in differences of gender, class and ethnicity.” Rivas and Safi discover the diversity and complexity of women’s views about the peace process in the three research projects reviewed.
While the vast majority of those interviewed for this research agreed that they want peace, Afghan women hold diverse views about what peace means and how peace should be attained. In general, women questioned how the state defined peace in its negotiations with the Taliban. Some called for a positive peace, defined as an end to armed violence and everyday violence. Others specified that any barrier to women’s participation in politics or the economy imposed by the peace process would be a “continuation of war.” Women held especially wide views on the reintegration of former combatants, seemingly influenced by where in the country they lived. For instance, rural women in some regions wished to see their family or community members return home, whereas rural women living in regions where non-Taliban armed groups were prevalent questioned why some armed groups were excluded from the peace process. Women living in major cities felt that the peace process should end if it meant the Taliban could re-enter public life, relaying fears that peace with the Taliban would lead to the suppression of women’s rights.
Tensions between rural and urban women influenced how women and women’s issues were represented in the peace talks and revealed important questions about accountability and transparency. The limited role afforded to women in the peace process led “to debates over who the right women representatives were and their motives,” meaning that women were judged by the (impossible) ability to represent all women. Notably, rural women were consulted but otherwise excluded from participation. One local educator from a rural province reported that “we have many consultations and always give our views, but we get very little information on what is said and are rarely invited to Kabul to speak for ourselves while we face violence every day.” Women in prominent civil society organizations even advocated against rural women’s inclusion, arguing that it would not lead to much change. As a result, the lack of transparency and accountability contributed to a lack of public support for the peace process. Further, Rivas and Safi found that rural women, when asked about the peace process, focused more on community and informal structures, “justice, forgiveness and healing, and activities that could address the psycho-social [and] practical aspects of reintegration and peacebuilding.” The authors note that these activities, hugely important for the “individual and community-level aspects of making peace,” have been neglected by deliberations within the peace process. Nonetheless, elite women directly involved in the peace process faced significant obstacles including a lack of clarity on the formal process and a perceived lack of support from other women. The public discourse at the time was undecided on whether women should be a part of the peace process—one member of parliament reported a commonly held view among their constituents that, because the war was started by men, men were responsible for creating peace and, therefore, women did not have a role to play. This context made it difficult for women to identify how the peace process should proceed and, among elite women interviewed for this research, “a consensus was reached not only that women were marginalized, but that the diversity of women from all sectors was not adequately represented in the existing composition of peace structures.”
Rivas and Safi conclude by reflecting on the current situation in Afghanistan following the U.S.’s departure in August 2021 and the Taliban’s rapid take-over of the country. While acknowledging the material gains for women from the U.S. intervention, namely in health and educational outcomes, they are also dismayed to witness the same stereotypes and gendered tropes of Afghan women replay in international coverage. The marginalization of women in Afghanistan is the outcome of both domestic and international forces that have effectively set Afghan women up to fail, with more powerful actors undermining their contributions and silencing their perspectives.
Informing Practice
This research demonstrates how Afghan women are marginalized and made invisible, how their contributions are dismissed, and how the complexity of their lives was actively diminished during the Afghan peace process. This work builds on research that we (as in, the editorial board) have featured in the Digest. In a previous analysis on women’s rights in Afghanistan—published soon after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan—we wrote in the Informing Practice section:
“To put it simply, war doesn’t protect women or improve women’s rights. It doesn’t protect women when they are subject to drone strikes, IEDs, random searches or seizures, or restricted access to food, water, sanitation, or healthcare when war demolishes those services. When women were largely excluded from formal peace talks with the Taliban, it is difficult to believe that women’s rights or representation was a priority at all to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.”
This idea—that war doesn’t protect women or women’s rights—is important to repeat as military tensions mount among the world’s powers. Calls for war often employ moralistic appeals to justify the use of violence, whether appeals for human rights protection or for a fight of good vs. evil. The reality of war—particularly how it is experienced by the population subjected to violence—stands in stark contrast to the moralistic depictions used for war justification. Indeed, how Afghan women experienced the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and their current status now that the U.S. has left, demonstrates how the war ultimately used and abandoned women.
A feminist foreign policy (FFP) offers an alternative approach to supporting global human rights without the threat of violence. A feminist approach to foreign policy “prioritizes peace, gender equality and environmental integrity; enshrines, promotes, and protects the human rights of all; seeks to disrupt colonial, racist, patriarchal and male-dominated power structures; and allocates significant resources…to achieve that vision.” Importantly, a feminist foreign policy aims to center the perspectives of the most marginalized people in society and embrace a bottom-up approach to designing policies.
In what ways could a feminist foreign policy—as opposed to a foreign military intervention—have better served the women of Afghanistan? First, a feminist foreign policy would recognize the agency of local women’s rights activists and the struggles important to them—including struggles connected to the broad support for women’s and girls’ access to education and employment. Further, by centering the perspectives of Afghans themselves, a feminist approach would recognize the importance of drawing on Islam to advocate for women’s rights and leveraging partnerships with Islamic institutions to build relationships with communities within Afghanistan. Such an approach would open an opportunity for international aid to support Afghan women’s efforts to advance women’s rights through educational and employment programming while safeguarding the local legitimacy of such efforts—all of which could be accomplished without the threat of violence or the use of force. Furthermore, attuned to local and global power dynamics, a feminist foreign policy would note the widespread perception in Afghan society that women’s rights are imposed by the West and therefore would point out how Western military intervention can actually weaken local movements for women’s rights. As it happened, the U.S. military invasion ultimately reinforced these perceptions and narratives by, no surprise, trying to forcibly impose a particular version of women’s rights. This action did incredible damage to local movements for women’s rights by giving ultraconservatives in Afghanistan a “powerful rally cry of defending the country from foreign invaders.” As swift and decisive as it may first appear, military intervention may have actually set back—perhaps by decades—the slow and steady work Afghan women were and have been engaging in to gain local legitimacy and bring the society along with them in their struggle for rights. [KC]
Continued Reading and Listening
The Daily. (2023, June 5). The new Afghanistan, through the eyes of three women. The New York Times. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/podcasts/the-daily/afganistan-women-taliban.html
War Prevention Initiative. (2023, March 15). Selected essays announced in feminist foreign policy essay “un-contest”. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://warpreventioninitiative.org/2023/selected-essays-announced-in-feminist-foreign-policy-essay-un-contest/
War Prevention Initiative. (2022, October 24). Peace briefing: Feminist foreign policy. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://warpreventioninitiative.org/2022/peace-briefing-feminist-foreign-policy/
Schaeffer, K. (2022, August 17). A year later, a look back at public opinion about the U.S. military exit from Afghanistan. Pew Research Center. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/17/a-year-later-a-look-back-at-public-opinion-about-the-u-s-military-exit-from-afghanistan/
The Takeaway. (2021, August 10). A look at feminist foreign policy in Afghanistan. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/look-feminist-foreign-policy-afghanistan
Chattopadhya, S. (2021, August 9). As the US Leaves Afghanistan, anti-war feminists push a new approach to foreign policy. The Nation. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://www.thenation.com/article/world/afghanistan-feminist-foreign-policy/
Thompson, L., Patel, G., Kripke, G., & O’Donnell, M. (2020). Toward a feminist foreign policy in the United States. International Center for Research on Women. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://www.icrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/FFP-USA_v11-spreads.pdf
Thompson, L., & Clement, R. (n.d.). Defining feminist foreign policy. International Center for Research on Women. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.wo-men.nl/kb-bestanden/1625575142.pdf
Peace Science Digest. (n.d.). Which women’s rights? Exploring gender and peace in Afghanistan. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://warpreventioninitiative.org/peace-science-digest/which-womens-rights-exploring-gender-and-peace-in-afghanistan/
Peace Science Digest. (n.d.). Female religious actors: Religious knowledge as a source of legitimacy for women peacebuilders in Afghanistan. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from https://warpreventioninitiative.org/peace-science-digest/female-religious-actors-religious-knowledge-as-a-source-of-legitimacy-for-women-peacebuilders-in-afghanistan/
Organizations
International Center for Research on Women: https://www.icrw.org
Feminist Foreign Policy Collective: https://www.ffpcollaborative.org
MADRE: https://www.madre.org
Keywords: managing conflicts without violence, gender, feminist foreign policy, women’s rights
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
