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Tagged: Afghanistan

On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity 

By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.

Gender Studies in Afghanistan or jender bazi: The Neoliberal University, Knowledge Production and Labour Under Military Occupation

By Paniz Musawi Natanzi. Following the military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, private universities in Kabul became sites of marketisation and models for other cities in the country. In the process of neoliberal transformation, gender mainstreaming was a key cross-sectoral tool, intersecting foreign development and military policies, which included higher education. Funding for the development of university degree programmes and scholarships in gender studies came with conditions of adhering to an anti-social political and epistemological understanding of gender that builds on expanding “individualisation and financialisation”, while claiming to serve communities through entrepreneurialism. The hegemony of finance under neoliberal imperialism, the current manifestation of capitalism and process of empire-building, in sites of military and humanitarian-developmental intervention, reconfigured social, political, economic and epistemological structures also through the university. A critical analysis.

Notes from Another Exodus: The Four-Month Struggle to Evacuate Afghan Poets and Scholars

By Fatemeh Shams. On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As the situation escalated over the following days and weeks, harrowing footage of airport stampedes, Taliban violence, protestors, chaos, and panic dominated the news. Four months later, the news cycle may have quietened, but the crisis in Afghanistan intensifies every day.