Afghanistan: Uphill Challenges for Women’s Political Rights

Abstract

This chapter focusses on the key parameters of women’s suffrage as well as women’s experiences as national parliamentarians since the beginning of the 2001 international intervention in Afghanistan. Afghan women’s trajectory of suffrage and political participation has been and remains a dangerous one that is marked by precarious gains in an extremely volatile sociocultural and political context. Fleschenberg argues that the fluidity of rules, fragile-cum-contested, hybrid institutions, decades of public silencing, marginalisation or outright misogynist systemic exclusion along with high levels of sociocultural and intense conflicts have resulted in women’s low political participation. Gender has been and continues to be one key site of ideological contestation and sociocultural cleavages among key power holders.

This chapter is based on a series of more comprehensive studies I have been carrying out in Afghanistan since 2007 with the support of Heinrich Böll Stiftung Afghanistan Office (see Fleschenberg 2009, 2012). This writing relies on the research paper titled ‘It’s not charity, it’s a seat of power—Moving beyond symbolic representation in Afghanistan’s transition politics’ (hbs 2016). I would like to thank, for the third time now (hopefully not the last), the wonderful team in Kabul, in particular Marion Müller, Zia Moballegh, Abdullah Athayi, Neelab Hakim, Afghan Gul and Nadeem, as well as both research assistants, Mateeullah Tareen and Masooda Saifi, who accompanied me during the field research and data analysis process in Kabul and Islamabad and without whom this research would not have been possible.