Voices of Afghan women: Human rights and economic development

Abstract

Contemporary Afghanistan provides a good case study for looking at the growing demand for women's rights within a tribal, Islamic and modernizing framework. As was explicated by three Afghan women interviewed at a conference in Italy in 2001, and additional women in Kabul in 2003, human rights for all people in Afghanistan, and specifically for women, can only be ensured through democracy. They believe that democracy can only be ensured through full participation of women in the political process especially when women comprise at least 60 percent of the country's population. In turn, they say that women's political participation is dependent on their economic empowerment and social and physical security. In this article, I emphasize the importance of economic empowerment and social and physical security for Afghan women as the urgent agenda for the international community to be responsible for and to engage in, as a prerequisite to a dialogue on human rights as women's rights. Toward that, this article will delineate the various debates on the human rights discourse, its political complexities, cultural applicability and universality and its ability to translate to women's rights in Afghanistan.---Afghan women, economic empowerment, human rights, women's rights We have become much more aware of the challenges facing women in societies in post-war transition due to recent media attention to geopolitical struggles in Muslim countries, and because of the particular attention that has sporadically been paid to Afghanistan. Journalists, human rights and feminist organizations have focused on the status of women as a way to understand these cultures. Less often heard are the voices of Afghan women themselves. This article developed from interviews with three Afghan women activists at an

Afghan Values or Women's Rights? Gendered Narratives about Continuity and Change in Urban Afghanistan

“…While we did not set out to study any particular ethnic group, our sample is made up entirely of women from the Hazara community. The main reason for this is that this group, who make up around 9 per cent of the population, has long 1 Even a recent article by Ahmed-Ghosh (2006) entitled 'Voices of Afghan Women' which does draw directly on women's voices to discuss the issue of women's rights is limited to the voices of three internationally prominent women activists from Afghanistan who each have well-worked out political views about the way forward for women. been seen as among the most repressed in the country and are consequently favoured by organisations working with poorer sections of society.…”

“…While Ahmed-Ghosh (2006) agrees that women in Afghanistan are defined by their place within the family and community and that their economic and social security is tied to their familial roles and identity, she draws a different set of conclusions about its implications. She sees family and kinship relationships as simultaneously the key source of women's survival, wellbeing and security as well as the primary structure of their oppression.…”

Compliance and Non-compliance with International Human Rights Standards: Overplaying the Cultural

“…This is because in order to initiate these processes, we first require the identification of a valid case for cultural interpretation by establishing that the violations in question have cultural roots. But, if in making that case, we are to rely to some extent on the 'voices' of those people whose rights are being violated (Çağatay 2001: 35;Okin 2003;Ahmed-Ghosh 2004), as indeed the positive view itself requires, then there must first be a perception on their part that they are oppressed by their culture and that, as such, this case is both valid and necessary. So where 'mistaken' preferences for unjust cultural practices constitute a significant part of the relationship that some women (and girls) have to their culture, then the capacity of internal cultural reinterpretation to challenge those unjust practices is inevitably restricted.…”

From Global Policy to Local Knowledge: What is the Link between Women's Formal Political Participation and Gender Equality in Conflict‐affected Contexts?

“…We do not refer to all the texts that emerged from the searches but focus on those that provide grounded information about context and people's ‘lived’ experiences. One subset of the literature we reviewed looks at how women are elected and how elected women function within the formal political systems (Boyd, ; Howard‐Merriam, ; Geisler, ; Tripp, , , ; Luciak, ; Tamale, ; Lovenduski and Karam, ; Johnson et al., ; Lindberg, ; Rajasingham‐Senenayake, ; Ahmed‐Ghosh, ; Bauer and Britton, ; Krook, ; Kandiyoti, , ; Moghadam, ; Adams, ; Bauer, , ; Burnet, ; Devlin and Elgie, ; Waylen, 2006, 2007, ; Blaydes and El Tarouty, ; Hughes, ; Mushemeza, ; Abdullah, ; Abdullah and Aisha, ; Agarwal, ; Fleschenberg, ; Kantengwa, ; Khattak, ; Krook et al., ). This literature focuses on political representation through electoral systems.…”