Engineering Gender Equality in Afghanistan

Professor Deniz Kandiyoti

The fall of the Taliban in 2001 was preceded and followed by a profusion of pronouncements concerning the status of Afghan women and the question of gender equality. It is possible to detect at least three distinct types of intervention with different target audiences and finalities. The first emanated from Northern feminists and public intellectuals (many with little or no prior exposure to Afghanistan) speaking to each other "through" Afghan women. This debate was primarily anchored in the moral anxieties generated by 9/11 and the ensuing "war on terror". A second strand was diffused through the UN-sponsored machineries for gender equality (alongside various bilateral and multilateral donors) that were rolled out in the context of the "global gender equality regime" and its prescriptions for post-conflict reconstruction. Finally, the tussles in the real world of Afghan politics reflected the power struggles inherent in the incomplete political settlement that followed the Bonn Agreement in 2001, with women's constitutional, political and civic rights serving as a litmus test of Islamic legitimacy. The central argument of this presentation is that the coexistence of these discursive universes- each following their own internal logic- produced outcomes that were far from benign.

Bio

Deniz Kandiyoti is Professor of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, former Chair of the Center of Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus (2001-2004) and editor of Central Asian Survey. She is the author of Concubines, Sisters and Citizens: Identities and Social Transformation (in Turkish), the editor of Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey (2002), Gendering the Middle East (1996) , Women, Islam and the State (1991) and numerous articles on gender, Islam, development and state policies. She served on the editorial boards of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society and Feminist Economics.

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk