1. Introduction
Few issues became as closely associated with the international project in post-2001 Afghanistan as the rights and status of Afghan women. Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, women’s education, political participation, employment, legal equality and public presence became important indicators through which the reconstruction of Afghanistan was understood and evaluated. International institutions, donor governments and development organisations increasingly positioned women’s empowerment as a central component of democratisation, human rights and state-building (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011). The advancement of Afghan women was therefore not treated simply as a matter of social justice; it became part of a much broader political project aimed at transforming Afghan society and constructing a new political order (Kandiyoti, 2007; Kapur, 2022).
There were significant changes during these two decades. Millions of Afghan girls gained access to formal education, women entered universities and professional workplaces, and women participated in parliament, government, civil society and public life in ways that had been severely restricted under Taliban rule (UN Women, 2024a, 2024b). These developments were meaningful, and any critical assessment of the international intervention must take them seriously. To reduce the post-2001 period to a story of Western imposition would therefore be as analytically inadequate as presenting it as an uncomplicated success in women’s liberation.
The more difficult question concerns the political conditions under which these gains were produced. Women’s rights were pursued within a system shaped by foreign military intervention, international development assistance, liberal state-building and externally funded institutions. Consequently, the language of women’s empowerment was never politically neutral. It was embedded within particular understandings of equality, freedom, individual agency and social progress. The question is therefore not only what international intervention did for Afghan women, but also how it shaped the terms through which Afghan women’s emancipation could be understood (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kapur, 2022; Mohanty, 2003).
This distinction is important because the post-2001 international project was strongly influenced by liberal feminist assumptions about women’s empowerment. Education, formal political participation, economic independence, legal equality and individual autonomy were rightly recognised as important dimensions of women’s rights. Yet when these categories become the primary measure through which women’s liberation is understood, other forms of agency can become less visible. Postcolonial feminist scholarship has long questioned the tendency to construct women in the Global South through universalised assumptions about emancipation, while scholarship on Islamic subjectivity has demonstrated that agency cannot always be understood through a simple opposition between autonomy and constraint (Mahmood, 2005). Afghan women whose political, social or religious practices did not conform to dominant liberal expectations could therefore be interpreted as less emancipated, less progressive or insufficiently autonomous. In this way, the politics of women’s rights could simultaneously expand opportunities for women and narrow the terms through which their agency was recognised (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023).
This article does not argue that liberal feminism had no value for Afghan women, nor does it romanticise Afghan tradition, religion or local social structures. Gender inequality, patriarchal authority and restrictions on women’s autonomy existed long before 2001 and cannot simply be attributed to foreign intervention (Ahmed, 1992; Kandiyoti, 2007). Nor should Islamic or indigenous approaches to gender be assumed to be inherently progressive. They are themselves internally diverse, contested and shaped by relations of power (Barlas, 2002; Mahmood, 2005; Wadud, 1999). The argument is instead that the dominance of a particular liberal feminist framework within international intervention limited the space available for alternative understandings of women’s rights and gender justice.
This raises a further question that is often left unresolved in critiques of interventionist feminism: if externally defined liberal feminism cannot be the sole framework through which Afghan women’s emancipation is understood, what other possibilities exist? Afghan women’s experiences cannot be adequately understood through a binary between Western feminism and Afghan tradition. Within Afghanistan and among Afghan women in the diaspora, gender, justice and women’s agency have been articulated through multiple intellectual and social traditions, including liberal, secular, Islamic, locally grounded and hybrid forms of feminist thought and practice. Islamic feminist scholarship, for example, has demonstrated that Muslim women can engage critically with religious traditions and reinterpret questions of gender, justice and authority rather than simply accepting a binary between religious tradition and women’s emancipation (Badran, 2009; Barlas, 2002; Moghadam, 2002; Wadud, 1999). These perspectives do not constitute a single alternative model. Rather, they point toward a more plural understanding of Afghan women’s agency in which women themselves have greater authority to define the terms of gender justice.
The central argument of this article is therefore that the post-2001 international intervention produced a fundamental contradiction in the politics of women’s rights. It created important institutional and social opportunities for Afghan women while simultaneously privileging particular liberal feminist understandings of emancipation within international governance and state-building (Kandiyoti, 2007; Kapur, 2022). In doing so, it risked marginalising alternative forms of feminist knowledge and agency, particularly those grounded in Afghan social realities and Islamic traditions. Recent scholarship on international educational interventions in Afghanistan similarly demonstrates how apparently emancipatory programmes could reproduce colonial assumptions about Muslim women, dependency and agency (Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023). The problem was consequently not simply that international actors failed to deliver women’s liberation. It was also that the intervention participated in defining what liberation should mean, which forms of agency should be recognised, and whose knowledge should shape the future of Afghan women (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kapur, 2022; Mohanty, 2003).
The article proceeds in three parts. The first examines how women’s rights became embedded within the post-2001 international intervention and how liberal feminist ideas shaped the dominant understanding of women’s empowerment. The second examines the forms of Afghan and Islamic feminist agency that were marginalised or subordinated within this framework, while considering the possibilities and limitations of locally grounded approaches to gender justice. The final part returns to the contradiction exposed by the collapse of the post-2001 political order in 2021 and considers what this experience reveals about the relationship between women’s rights, international intervention and Afghan women’s agency.
2. Women’s Rights and the Post-2001 International Intervention
The political significance attached to Afghan women’s rights after 2001 cannot be separated from the broader international intervention that followed the attacks of 11 September 2001. The removal of the Taliban regime was initially framed primarily through the language of international security and counterterrorism. Yet the political justification for intervention soon became connected to a wider project of political and social transformation. Afghanistan was to be reconstructed as a democratic state, its institutions rebuilt, its economy integrated into international systems, and its population brought into a new political order. Within this project, the position of women became an important measure of whether transformation was taking place (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011).
The treatment of women under the Taliban provided a particularly powerful basis for this narrative. Restrictions on women’s education, employment, movement and participation in public life became internationally visible symbols of Taliban rule. Afghan women were consequently positioned at the intersection of two political narratives: they were represented as victims of an exceptionally restrictive political order, but also as symbols of the society that international intervention was expected to transform. Women’s liberation thus became connected to the broader language of freedom, democracy and modernisation that accompanied the post-2001 political project (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kapur, 2022).
This connection was institutionalised through the reconstruction of the Afghan state. The 2004 Constitution formally established equality between men and women and created a legal basis for women’s participation in political life. International donors and development agencies invested heavily in programmes concerning women’s education, political participation, economic empowerment and access to justice. Women entered parliament, government institutions, universities, professional occupations and civil society organisations (Kandiyoti, 2007; UN Women, 2024a, 2024b). For many Afghan women, these developments represented genuine opportunities that had previously been unavailable or severely restricted. The significance of these changes should not be minimised simply because they emerged within an internationally supported political framework.
At the same time, however, the expansion of women’s rights occurred within a highly unequal relationship between international institutions and Afghan political actors. Foreign governments, international organisations and donor agencies possessed considerable financial, institutional and political resources through which they influenced the priorities of reconstruction and development (Suhrke, 2011). Gender equality consequently became incorporated into programmes whose objectives extended beyond women’s rights themselves, including democratisation, institutional reform, economic development and the consolidation of the Afghan state (Kandiyoti, 2007).
This produced an important tension. Women’s rights could function simultaneously as an objective of social justice and as an instrument of political transformation. The two were not necessarily incompatible, but they were not identical either. When women’s empowerment became embedded within a broader project of liberal state-building, particular understandings of what constituted an empowered woman could acquire institutional authority. Education, formal employment, political representation, legal equality and participation in public institutions became highly visible indicators of progress. These were significant achievements, but their prominence also reflected the assumptions of the international institutions through which reconstruction was organised (Cornwall, 2016; Kabeer, 1999; Suhrke, 2011).
The issue, therefore, was not simply whether Afghan women benefited from international intervention. Many clearly did. The more difficult question is how the international political framework determined which forms of benefit, participation and agency became most visible and politically valued. A woman entering parliament, becoming a professional, attending university or participating in a civil society organisation could readily be understood within the language of international empowerment. Other forms of agency—particularly those expressed through religious knowledge, family and community networks, informal political practices or locally grounded understandings of justice—were less easily incorporated into the same framework. This reflects a broader concern within feminist scholarship that dominant models of empowerment can privilege particular forms of agency while rendering other forms less visible (Kabeer, 1999; Mahmood, 2005; Mohanty, 2003).
This distinction matters because the international project often treated the transformation of Afghan women’s status as part of the transformation of Afghan society itself. Gender equality was therefore not merely a question of protecting individual rights; it became associated with the broader transition from what was represented as a traditional and patriarchal society toward a democratic and modern political order. Such a framework risked creating an implicit hierarchy between different forms of social life, in which some practices were interpreted as evidence of progress while others were understood primarily as obstacles to women’s emancipation (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023; Kandiyoti, 2007).
The resulting tension became particularly visible in the relationship between universal claims about women’s rights and the social and religious diversity of Afghan society. International gender policies frequently operated through universal categories of equality and individual rights, while Afghan women encountered these policies within highly varied social environments. Class, ethnicity, geography, family structure, economic position, religious commitment and access to education all shaped women’s experiences differently. There was therefore no single Afghan experience of either oppression or empowerment (Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
This does not mean that appeals to culture or religion should be used to justify restrictions on women. Such an approach would risk turning cultural difference into an excuse for inequality. Rather, the point is that gender justice cannot be separated from the social worlds in which women live. A rights framework that does not engage seriously with those worlds may create formal opportunities while failing to recognise the different ways in which women understand, negotiate and exercise agency (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Mahmood, 2005).
The post-2001 period therefore produced a paradox at the heart of international intervention. On one side, the intervention created institutional openings through which many Afghan women expanded their access to education, political participation, employment and public life. On the other, these opportunities were embedded within an international political framework that possessed considerable influence over how women’s empowerment was conceptualised and implemented (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011). The question of women’s rights consequently became inseparable from a deeper question of political authority: who had the power to define what empowerment meant for Afghan women?
It is this question that brings liberal feminism into the centre of the analysis. The problem is not that the principles of equality, education, political participation or individual rights are inherently Western and therefore inappropriate for Afghan women. Afghan women themselves have embraced and advocated these principles in diverse ways. The problem arises when one particular understanding of emancipation becomes sufficiently dominant that other feminist possibilities are evaluated according to its terms (Mohanty, 1984, 2003; Kapur, 2022). The next section therefore examines how liberal feminist assumptions shaped the politics of women’s empowerment in post-2001 Afghanistan and how this process affected the recognition of alternative forms of Afghan women’s agency.
3. Liberal Feminism and the Governance of Afghan Women
Liberal feminism occupies an important place in the politics of women’s rights because of its emphasis on equality, individual rights, autonomy and women’s equal participation in public life. Many of the demands associated with liberal feminism—including access to education, employment, political representation, legal equality and protection from discrimination—have also been central to Afghan women’s struggles. It would therefore be misleading to portray liberal feminism simply as an external ideology imposed upon Afghan women. Afghan women themselves have advocated many of these principles, and international support for them has at times provided important resources for challenging deeply entrenched forms of gender inequality (Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
The concern is not with the existence of these principles but with their elevation into a dominant framework through which women’s emancipation is interpreted. Within the post-2001 intervention, liberal understandings of empowerment became closely connected to state-building, development policy and institutional reform. Women’s advancement was increasingly measured through participation in formal institutions and access to rights recognised within the legal and political structures of the new Afghan state (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011). This produced important gains, but it also established particular standards through which women’s progress could be made visible and assessed.
At the centre of this framework was the figure of the autonomous individual woman. Empowerment was frequently associated with the expansion of individual choice, economic independence, education, political participation and access to formal institutions. These are undoubtedly important dimensions of women’s freedom. Yet the emphasis on individual autonomy can become problematic when it is treated as a universal measure of emancipation without sufficient attention to the social relationships through which women actually live and exercise agency (Kabeer, 1999; Mahmood, 2005).
Afghan women’s lives have never been organised solely through formal political institutions. Family, community, religion, kinship networks, local organisations and social relationships remain significant sites through which women negotiate authority and make decisions. These structures can certainly reproduce patriarchal power and restrict women’s choices. But they can also constitute spaces through which women exercise influence, develop forms of solidarity and negotiate social change. Treating the individual and the community as opposing categories can therefore obscure the complex ways in which Afghan women navigate both constraint and agency (Kandiyoti, 2007; Mahmood, 2005; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
This is particularly important in relation to religion. Within some international policy frameworks, Islam was frequently positioned within a broader narrative of cultural or religious conservatism that appeared to stand in tension with women’s emancipation. Such representations risked reducing a complex religious and intellectual tradition to its most restrictive interpretations (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023). Yet Afghan women have also engaged Islam as a source of ethical reasoning, identity, community and political argument. For some women, religious commitment is not experienced as the opposite of agency; it is part of the framework through which agency itself is understood (Barlas, 2002; Mahmood, 2005; Wadud, 1999).
The problem, therefore, is not that liberal feminist principles are necessarily incompatible with Afghan society. Rather, it is that the international policy environment could create an implicit hierarchy between different forms of women’s agency. Forms of participation that corresponded with internationally recognised models of empowerment were more readily legible to institutions, donors and policymakers. Other forms of agency could be interpreted as insufficiently progressive precisely because they did not conform to the same assumptions about autonomy, modernity or emancipation (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Mohanty, 1984, 2003).
This process can be understood as a problem of political and epistemic recognition. Women’s agency does not become meaningful only when it takes a particular institutional form. Yet international development systems require categories through which programmes can identify beneficiaries, measure outcomes and demonstrate progress. Consequently, complex and contested forms of agency are often translated into measurable indicators: numbers of women in parliament, numbers of girls enrolled in school, numbers of women employed, numbers of women receiving training or participating in programmes. Such indicators can provide valuable evidence of change, but they cannot capture the full social meaning of empowerment (Kabeer, 1999; Cornwall, 2016).
The danger emerges when what can be measured institutionally becomes confused with what constitutes emancipation itself. A woman may gain access to formal political institutions while continuing to face restrictions within her household. Another may exercise substantial influence within her community without ever entering a formal institution. A woman may understand her rights through international human rights language, another through Islamic concepts of justice, and another through a combination of religious, familial and political ideas. None of these experiences can adequately be reduced to a single model of empowerment. As Mahmood (2005) demonstrates, agency cannot necessarily be equated with resistance to established norms; it can also emerge through the ways subjects inhabit, negotiate and reinterpret those norms.
This is where the postcolonial feminist critique becomes particularly relevant. Postcolonial feminists have challenged the tendency to construct women in the Global South as a homogeneous category of victims whose liberation is imagined through Western feminist frameworks (Mohanty, 1984, 2003). The problem with such representations is not simply that they misdescribe individual women. They can also reproduce a hierarchy of knowledge in which the experiences and categories developed within Western political contexts become the standard against which other women’s lives are evaluated (Mohanty, 2002, 2003; Narayan, 1997).
In the Afghan context, this creates a particularly difficult representational politics. The “Afghan woman” can become simultaneously a symbol of oppression and a symbol of international progress. Under Taliban rule, her exclusion from education, employment and public life could be mobilised as evidence of the necessity of intervention. Under the post-2001 order, her participation in parliament, university and professional life could then be presented as evidence of the success of intervention. In both cases, however, there is a risk that Afghan women become symbols within political narratives constructed by others rather than recognised as political subjects with diverse and sometimes contradictory understandings of their own lives (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kapur, 2002; Kapur, 2022).
This does not mean that the international focus on Afghan women’s rights was inherently illegitimate. Nor does it mean that the social restrictions imposed on women by patriarchal structures, including those justified through particular interpretations of religion or tradition, should be overlooked. A critical approach must be capable of holding both realities together: Afghan women faced genuine forms of gendered inequality, and international responses to that inequality could themselves reproduce forms of political and epistemic hierarchy (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kandiyoti, 2007; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023).
The central issue is therefore one of plurality. Afghan women did not require a single externally defined pathway to emancipation. Their experiences reveal the need to recognise multiple ways of understanding equality, dignity, justice and agency. Liberal feminist ideas remain one important part of this landscape, particularly where women themselves mobilise them. But they should not become the exclusive vocabulary through which Afghan women’s political aspirations are recognised (Mohanty, 2003; Moghadam, 2002).
This distinction is crucial for understanding the contradictions of international intervention. The intervention did not simply introduce women’s rights into a society that had previously lacked them. Afghan women had their own histories of political participation, education, activism and negotiation long before 2001 (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007). What changed after 2001 was the scale of international involvement and the institutional power attached to particular understandings of gender equality. The resulting transformation therefore involved not only the expansion of women’s opportunities but also a struggle over whose knowledge would define the meaning of those opportunities.
The question that follows is consequently not whether Afghan women should have adopted liberal feminism instead of their own traditions. It is whether the international gender agenda created sufficient space for Afghan women to draw upon multiple intellectual and social traditions in defining their own struggles. This leads to the next part of the analysis: the alternative feminist perspectives and forms of agency that existed alongside the dominant interventionist framework, particularly locally grounded and Islamic approaches to gender justice.
4. Beyond Liberal Feminism: Afghan and Islamic Feminist Perspectives
Critiquing the dominance of liberal feminism within international intervention raises an unavoidable question: if liberal feminism should not be the sole framework through which Afghan women’s emancipation is understood, what should take its place? The answer cannot be found in simply reversing the hierarchy and replacing one universal model with another. There is no single “Afghan feminism” capable of representing all Afghan women, just as there is no single liberal feminist position. Afghan women differ in their religious commitments, social backgrounds, political beliefs, class positions, ethnic identities, geographic experiences and understandings of justice (Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007). The more productive alternative is therefore not a replacement but a pluralisation of feminist knowledge and political agency.
This distinction matters because debates about Afghan women’s rights have often been structured through an unhelpful binary. On one side stands a liberal conception of women’s emancipation associated with individual rights, secular institutions, formal equality and public participation. On the other is a loosely defined category of “Afghan culture” or “tradition,” often treated as inherently conservative and resistant to women’s rights. Such a binary leaves little intellectual space for Afghan women who draw upon both universal rights and local or religious traditions, or who understand gender justice through concepts that cannot be neatly classified as either Western or traditional (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Mohanty, 1984, 2003).
An alternative approach begins by taking Afghan women seriously as producers of knowledge rather than merely as beneficiaries of policy. Afghan women have developed their understandings of justice through multiple sources: education, political experience, religious knowledge, family and community life, civil society, literature, activism and engagement with international human rights discourse (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007). These sources do not always produce the same conclusions. Indeed, they may conflict with one another. But precisely because Afghan women’s political experiences are diverse, gender justice cannot be adequately developed through a framework that assumes a single pathway to emancipation.
4.1. Locally Grounded and Indigenous Forms of Agency
A locally grounded approach does not require romanticising Afghan social structures. Family, community and religious institutions can provide important forms of belonging and support, but they can also reproduce gender hierarchy and restrict women’s choices. The purpose of taking local knowledge seriously is therefore not to declare local practices inherently emancipatory. Rather, it is to recognise that women negotiate power within these structures and that their agency cannot always be understood through the language of individual autonomy alone (Kandiyoti, 2007; Mahmood, 2005).
For many Afghan women, political agency has operated through everyday negotiations that rarely appear in formal measures of women’s empowerment. Women may negotiate decisions within households, build networks of mutual support, influence community practices, organise around education, provide assistance to other women or use relationships within local institutions to expand their room for action. Such practices may not resemble the institutional forms of participation favoured by international programmes, but they can nevertheless constitute meaningful forms of political and social agency (Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
This does not mean that informal or community-based forms of agency should replace women’s participation in formal political institutions. Rather, it suggests that the two should not be treated as mutually exclusive. The political significance of women’s participation in parliament, employment or education cannot be understood independently from the social relationships within which those opportunities become meaningful and sustainable.
A locally grounded feminist perspective therefore asks a different question from a purely institutional approach. Instead of asking only whether women have entered existing structures of power, it asks how women negotiate, reshape and sometimes resist the structures in which they live. This shifts attention from women as recipients of empowerment programmes toward women as social and political actors (Kabeer, 1999; Mahmood, 2005).
4.2. Islamic Feminist Possibilities
Islamic feminism provides another important perspective within this broader field of feminist plurality. Its significance in Afghanistan lies partly in challenging the assumption that women’s rights must necessarily be articulated through a secular or externally defined framework in order to be legitimate. Islamic feminist approaches have sought to challenge patriarchal interpretations of religious texts and social practices while drawing upon Islamic concepts of justice, dignity, equality and moral responsibility (Badran, 2009; Barlas, 2002; Moghadam, 2002; Wadud, 1999).
This does not mean that Islam contains a single uncontested feminist position. Islamic feminist thought is itself diverse, and debates exist over interpretation, authority and the relationship between religious principles and contemporary understandings of gender equality. Nor should Islamic feminism be treated as automatically emancipatory. Religious interpretations, like secular political ideologies, can be shaped by unequal relations of power (Barlas, 2002; Mahmood, 2005).
Its significance lies elsewhere: Islamic feminist approaches demonstrate that the relationship between Islam and women’s rights cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between religion and emancipation. Muslim women can challenge patriarchal authority while remaining deeply committed to their religious identities. They can interpret religious texts, question inherited practices and articulate demands for justice through Islamic concepts without necessarily accepting the assumption that secularisation is a prerequisite for women’s freedom (Badran, 2009; Barlas, 2002; Wadud, 1999).
This matters because international gender programmes sometimes treated religion primarily as a barrier that needed to be overcome in order to advance women’s rights. Such an approach risks overlooking the possibility that religion can also provide women with intellectual and moral resources through which they contest gender inequality. More importantly, it can position women who express their demands through religious language as less progressive than women who use secular feminist language (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023).
Recognising Islamic feminist perspectives therefore does not require accepting every claim made in the name of Islam. It requires taking seriously the possibility that Afghan Muslim women themselves may draw upon religious traditions to formulate critiques of patriarchy and visions of justice. Their arguments should be engaged as political and intellectual contributions rather than dismissed in advance as expressions of cultural conservatism (Badran, 2009; Moghadam, 2002).
4.3. Afghan Feminist Agency as Plural and Hybrid
The distinction between liberal, indigenous and Islamic feminism should not be treated as rigid. In practice, Afghan women’s political identities frequently cross these boundaries. A woman may advocate constitutional equality while also grounding her understanding of justice in Islam. Another may support women’s education and political participation while placing considerable importance on family and community relationships. Others may reject the language of feminism altogether while nevertheless challenging restrictions on women’s lives and advocating for women’s education, dignity or political participation.
These possibilities demonstrate why the search for a single alternative to liberal feminism is ultimately misplaced. Afghan women’s agency is better understood as plural, negotiated and sometimes hybrid. Women can adopt, adapt, contest and combine ideas from different intellectual traditions. Their political agency does not need to conform to a predetermined category in order to be recognised as legitimate (Mohanty, 2003; Narayan, 1997).
This also changes how the relationship between international and local actors should be understood. The question should not be whether international actors should abandon women’s rights in favour of “local culture.” Such an approach would risk reproducing another simplistic binary and could leave existing forms of gender inequality unchallenged. Nor should international institutions assume that universal rights can be effectively implemented without engaging with the social, cultural and religious contexts in which women live (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Kandiyoti, 2007).
The more productive approach is to understand international engagement as one resource within a wider field of Afghan women’s political agency. International actors can provide funding, legal support, education, protection and platforms for advocacy, but they should not become the ultimate authority on what Afghan women’s emancipation must look like. The authority to interpret and negotiate the meaning of gender justice must remain connected to the women whose lives are directly affected by these political projects. This is consistent with the broader postcolonial feminist insistence that women should not be reduced to passive subjects of externally defined projects of liberation (Mohanty, 2003; Kapur, 2022).
The importance of these alternative perspectives becomes even clearer when considering the longer trajectory of the post-2001 intervention. If women’s rights are understood primarily through the institutions created and supported by international actors, then the sustainability of those rights becomes closely connected to the survival of the political order itself. The collapse of that order in 2021 consequently raises a difficult question: what happens when the institutions through which women’s empowerment was organised are no longer able to protect it? (Suhrke, 2011; UN Women, 2024b).
This question brings the analysis back to the central contradiction of international intervention. The issue was never simply whether Afghan women gained rights between 2001 and 2021. Many did. The deeper issue is whether the political project that produced and supported those gains created sufficient space for women’s rights to become socially and politically rooted beyond the institutions and international structures that sustained them. The return of the Taliban therefore provides a crucial point from which to examine the limits, fragilities and contradictions of the post-2001 gender project.
5. The Contradictions of International Intervention
The contradictions surrounding women’s rights in post-2001 Afghanistan become most visible when the achievements of the intervention are considered alongside the political conditions through which those achievements were produced. International intervention created important institutional spaces for women, but it also embedded women’s rights within a political order that remained heavily dependent on foreign military, financial and institutional support (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011). This dependency did not make the gains unreal, but it made their political foundations more fragile than the language of long-term transformation often suggested.
One of the clearest contradictions was therefore between empowerment and dependency. The post-2001 period witnessed the expansion of women’s participation in state institutions, civil society and public life, while international donors played a substantial role in financing and supporting many of the institutions through which this participation occurred. Women’s organisations and activists used these resources in ways that cannot be reduced to passive dependence; Afghan women frequently appropriated international resources for their own political purposes. Nevertheless, the broader structure of intervention meant that the political space available to women was partly shaped by priorities established within an internationally supported state-building project (Kandiyoti, 2007; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
A second contradiction emerged between visibility and political authority. Afghan women became highly visible within international narratives of reconstruction. Their participation in elections, parliament, civil society and development programmes could be presented as evidence that Afghanistan was becoming more democratic and gender-inclusive. Yet visibility did not necessarily translate into equal influence over the political processes determining the country’s future. Women’s presence within institutions could coexist with their limited influence over major questions of war, peace and national security (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011).
This contradiction became particularly apparent in the peace process. UN Women records that women participated in the intra-Afghan negotiations, including four women on the Afghan government’s 24-member negotiating team, and that women negotiators advocated for women’s rights and leadership to remain on the negotiation agenda. Yet the broader record of peace negotiations was marked by substantial exclusion. UN Women’s Afghanistan Gender Country Profile 2024 reports that women attended only 22 per cent of high-level formal and informal peace talks between 2005 and 2020, while most of those who did participate were parliamentarians, senior government officials or prominent civil society figures (UN Women, 2024a). (UN Women)
This gap between formal inclusion and substantive political power is important. Representation within institutions can be a significant achievement, but representation alone does not determine the priorities of political settlements. The peace process demonstrated that women’s participation remained vulnerable when questions of security, military withdrawal and political settlement became dominant. UN Women reported that the peace process was increasingly jeopardised as the security situation deteriorated and the US announced its troop drawdown in 2021. Following the Taliban takeover, the political space in which women had participated in formal peace and security processes contracted dramatically (UN Women, 2024b). (Home | UN Women Transparency Portal)
The Doha process further illustrates this tension. According to UN Women, the 2020 US-Taliban troop withdrawal agreement did not include conditions relating to women’s rights or political inclusion, while its broader assessment notes that 80 per cent of peace negotiations on Afghanistan between 2005 and 2020 had no Afghan women participating (UN Women, 2024a, 2024b). The significance of this is not simply that women were absent from particular negotiations. It reveals a deeper contradiction in the international project: women’s rights had been presented for two decades as an important component of Afghanistan’s political transformation, yet when the political settlement determining the country’s future was negotiated, women’s participation and rights could become significantly less central. (UN Women)
This produces a third contradiction: women’s rights as a principle versus women’s rights as a geopolitical priority. The distinction is important. It would be too simple to conclude that international actors did not care about Afghan women. International institutions continued to advocate for women’s participation and rights, and Afghan women themselves played an active role in these efforts. The more difficult observation is that the political weight given to women’s rights could change according to the strategic context. Rights could be strongly institutionalised within development and governance programmes while becoming more vulnerable when they encountered the priorities of war termination, negotiations and withdrawal (Kandiyoti, 2007; Kapur, 2022).
A fourth contradiction concerns institutional progress and social sustainability. The creation of laws, ministries, parliamentary representation and gender programmes was significant, but institutional change does not automatically produce durable transformation in social relations. The post-2001 gender architecture was closely connected to the state and to international support. When the Islamic Republic collapsed in August 2021, much of this institutional architecture was dismantled. UN Women reports that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was abolished and that women were absent from the governing structure established by the de facto authorities. It also documented severe restrictions on women’s public participation and the shrinking operating space of women-led civil society organisations (UN Women, 2025b). (Home | UN Women Transparency Portal)
The collapse should not, however, be interpreted as proof that the social changes of the previous two decades were meaningless. Nor should it lead to the conclusion that Afghan women were simply returned to the position they occupied before 2001. Women had acquired education, professional experience, political knowledge, organisational networks and forms of collective identity that could not simply be erased by institutional collapse. Afghan women also continued to organise and advocate under increasingly restrictive circumstances. UN Women has documented continued activity by women-led civil society organisations and efforts to maintain women’s participation and advocacy despite severe constraints (UN Women, 2024a, 2024b, 2025b). (Home | UN Women Transparency Portal)
The more significant lesson is therefore about the political architecture through which women’s rights were pursued. When gender equality is embedded primarily within a particular state-building project, the durability of institutional gains becomes partly dependent upon the durability of that political order. This creates a difficult relationship between women’s rights and intervention: international involvement can create resources and opportunities that are enormously important to women, while simultaneously creating forms of institutional dependency that become visible when international political support is withdrawn (Suhrke, 2011; Kapur, 2022).
There is also a deeper epistemic contradiction. The international intervention sought to transform Afghan society partly through a universal language of women’s rights. Yet the political and social sustainability of those rights depended on whether they could become meaningful within Afghanistan’s own diverse social and intellectual landscapes. Where international gender policy privileged particular forms of liberal institutional participation, it risked treating other forms of agency as secondary (Mohanty, 1984, 2003; Mahmood, 2005). The issue was therefore not simply whether Afghan women were included, but which Afghan women, which forms of participation and which understandings of gender justice were being included.
This is where the earlier discussion of locally grounded and Islamic feminist perspectives becomes particularly important. If women’s rights are to remain meaningful beyond the political structures of foreign intervention, Afghan women need more than institutional inclusion within externally supported systems. They also need intellectual and political space to negotiate the meaning of justice through their own diverse traditions and experiences (Barlas, 2002; Moghadam, 2002; Rostami-Povey, 2007). The challenge is not to abandon universal rights, nor to romanticise local structures, but to recognise that sustainable gender justice cannot be produced through a single political or feminist vocabulary.
The experience of 2001–2021 therefore reveals a contradiction at the heart of international intervention. The intervention helped create real opportunities for Afghan women while simultaneously embedding those opportunities within a political order whose priorities and institutional foundations were heavily shaped by external actors. Women’s rights became both a substantive goal and part of the language through which the intervention represented political progress. When that political order collapsed, the fragility of this relationship became difficult to ignore.
The question that follows is consequently not whether the international intervention achieved nothing for Afghan women. It clearly did not. Nor is the answer to retreat into an idealised conception of Afghan tradition. Rather, the experience demands a reconsideration of how women’s rights are pursued: from a model in which international actors define the framework of emancipation toward one in which Afghan women have greater authority to define, contest and sustain the meaning of gender justice (Mohanty, 2003; Kapur, 2022).
6. Rethinking Women’s Rights Beyond Intervention
The experience of post-2001 Afghanistan does not suggest that international engagement with women’s rights should simply be abandoned. Nor does it suggest that liberal ideas of equality, autonomy or political participation have no relevance to Afghan women. Afghan women have themselves demanded these rights, participated in international advocacy and used liberal human rights frameworks to challenge gender inequality. The more important lesson is that women’s rights cannot be sustained through a single model of emancipation, particularly when that model is embedded within a political project whose priorities and institutional structures are largely determined externally (Kandiyoti, 2007; Kapur, 2022).
Rethinking women’s rights therefore requires moving beyond the opposition between “Western” and “Afghan” approaches. Such a binary reproduces the same simplification that has characterised much of the international discussion of Afghan women. Afghan women are neither a homogeneous cultural group waiting to be liberated nor a unified political constituency possessing a single alternative conception of gender justice. They occupy different social, religious, economic and political positions and may draw upon multiple traditions when articulating their demands (Mohanty, 1984, 2003; Narayan, 1997).
A more productive framework is one of feminist plurality. This does not mean treating all understandings of gender as equally emancipatory or avoiding difficult questions about discrimination and power. Rather, it means recognising that there can be multiple intellectual and political routes through which women challenge inequality. Liberal feminist claims to legal equality and political participation may coexist with Islamic arguments about justice and dignity, locally grounded forms of collective organising, and other forms of Afghan women’s political practice. These approaches may complement one another, contradict one another or develop in tension. Their coexistence should not be viewed as a weakness; it is part of the political reality of women’s movements (Badran, 2009; Moghadam, 2002; Mohanty, 2003).
Such plurality also requires taking Afghan women seriously as producers of knowledge. For much of the post-2001 period, international institutions possessed substantial authority to identify gender problems, design interventions and establish indicators through which progress could be measured. Afghan women certainly participated in these processes, and many became influential advocates within them. Nevertheless, the broader structure of international governance often positioned external institutions as funders, experts and designers of policy, while Afghan women were more frequently positioned as beneficiaries, implementers or representatives of local communities (Kandiyoti, 2007; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023). This reflects a wider postcolonial feminist concern with whose knowledge is treated as authoritative in the production of development and gender policy (Mohanty, 1984, 2003).
Reversing this relationship does not mean excluding international actors. It means changing the terms of engagement. International institutions can provide financial resources, legal expertise, educational opportunities, protection mechanisms and platforms for advocacy. But their role should be understood as supporting Afghan women’s political agency rather than determining its content. This requires greater recognition of Afghan women’s own intellectual traditions, including Islamic feminist approaches and locally grounded understandings of justice, while also allowing women to reject, adapt or combine these traditions according to their own circumstances (Barlas, 2002; Mahmood, 2005; Rostami-Povey, 2007).
The question of religion is particularly important in this regard. Treating Islam primarily as an obstacle to women’s rights risks reproducing the very hierarchy of knowledge that this article has identified. Yet treating Islam as inherently compatible with gender equality would be equally simplistic. What matters is the recognition that Islamic traditions are internally contested and that Muslim women can participate in those interpretive and political debates themselves. Women’s religious identities should neither be used to justify restrictions on their rights nor treated as evidence that they are incapable of pursuing feminist claims (Badran, 2009; Barlas, 2002; Moghadam, 2002; Wadud, 1999).
This approach also changes how “local ownership” should be understood. Local ownership cannot simply mean transferring responsibility for externally designed programmes to Afghan organisations. Genuine ownership requires participation in defining the problem itself, determining what counts as progress, identifying which forms of knowledge are relevant and deciding how resources should be used. In the context of women’s rights, this means asking Afghan women not only how international programmes can be improved, but what gender justice means from their own diverse perspectives (Cornwall & Rivas, 2015; Kandiyoti, 2007).
Such an approach is particularly important after 2021. The restrictions imposed by the Taliban have created an environment in which women’s access to education, employment, public participation and other fundamental rights has been severely constrained. Afghanistan remains the only country where girls and women are prohibited from secondary and higher education, while women also face severe restrictions on employment, movement and participation in public life (Human Rights Watch, 2026; UN Women, 2025a). These restrictions cannot be justified simply as expressions of Afghan culture or religious authenticity. At the same time, responding to them solely through externally defined models of emancipation risks repeating the limitations of the previous intervention. Supporting Afghan women requires both a clear commitment to their rights and a recognition of their political and intellectual agency.
Afghan women themselves have demonstrated that these two commitments do not have to be separated. Women have continued to advocate for education, employment, political participation and freedom while drawing upon different forms of political, religious and social reasoning. Some have worked through international human rights institutions; others have organised through community networks, civil society or diaspora organisations. Some articulate their demands through explicitly feminist language, while others frame them through education, dignity, justice, Islam or national belonging. These differences should not be treated as evidence of political fragmentation that needs to be overcome by imposing a single framework. They demonstrate the plurality of Afghan women’s political agency (Sultani, 2024; Afary, 2024).
The future of women’s rights in Afghanistan therefore requires a shift in the politics of intervention itself. Rather than asking how international actors can construct the “right” model of Afghan womanhood, the more appropriate question is how international engagement can create conditions in which Afghan women can define and pursue their own political futures. This means supporting women’s education and political participation without assuming that these goals have only one legitimate cultural or intellectual foundation. It means defending universal rights while remaining attentive to the diverse ways in which women understand and claim those rights. And it means recognising Afghan women not simply as beneficiaries of international protection, but as political actors whose knowledge should shape the policies intended to affect their lives (Mohanty, 2003; Kapur, 2022).
The central lesson of the post-2001 period is therefore not that women’s rights and international intervention are inherently incompatible. Rather, their relationship is shaped by questions of power: who defines the problem, who determines the solution, whose knowledge is recognised and whose agency is considered legitimate. The contradictions of intervention emerge when the language of women’s empowerment is separated from these questions of political authority (Kapur, 2022; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023).
A more sustainable approach to gender justice would consequently move away from the idea that Afghan women need to be transformed according to a predetermined model of emancipation. It would instead recognise that Afghan women’s futures may be shaped through multiple feminist, religious, political and social traditions. Liberal feminism can remain one source of political language and advocacy, but it should exist alongside—not above—other forms of feminist knowledge and practice (Mohanty, 2003; Moghadam, 2002).
In this sense, the challenge is not to choose between Western feminism and Afghan tradition. It is to create the political and intellectual conditions in which Afghan women themselves can negotiate that relationship. Such an approach would not eliminate disagreement over what gender justice means. On the contrary, it would make disagreement visible as part of political agency rather than treating it as evidence that Afghan women require an external authority to speak on their behalf.
7. 2021 and the Limits of the Interventionist Gender Project
The return of the Taliban to power in August 2021 marked a profound rupture in Afghanistan’s political order and exposed one of the central contradictions of the post-2001 approach to women’s rights. For two decades, women’s advancement had been closely associated with the institutions of the Islamic Republic, international assistance, donor funding and the broader political architecture established after the US-led intervention. When that political order collapsed, many of the institutional protections and opportunities associated with it became vulnerable. The subsequent restrictions imposed on women demonstrated not only the severity of the reversal but also the extent to which many gains had remained dependent on a political structure that could not be sustained after the withdrawal of international forces (Suhrke, 2011; UN Women, 2024a, 2025a).
The events surrounding the peace process made this contradiction particularly visible. Afghan women were not completely absent from peace negotiations. Women participated in the Afghan government negotiating delegation and advocated for the preservation of women’s rights. Four women were members of the 24-person Afghan government negotiating team and successfully pressed for women’s rights and leadership to remain on the negotiation agenda (UN Women, 2024a). Yet their participation remained limited in relation to the decisions that ultimately determined the country’s political future. UN Women reports that women participated in only 22 per cent of high-level formal and informal peace talks between 2005 and 2020, while its assessment of the peace process notes that 80 per cent of negotiations during that period had no Afghan women participating. The February 2020 US–Taliban troop withdrawal agreement also contained no conditions relating to women’s rights or political inclusion (UN Women, 2024a, 2024b). (UN Women)
This disparity is significant because the peace process was not simply another policy arena. It was the process through which the political order that had provided the institutional basis for many post-2001 reforms was being renegotiated. Women’s rights had been presented for years as an important dimension of Afghanistan’s reconstruction and democratic transformation, yet women remained comparatively marginal to the negotiations that would determine the future of that political system. The contradiction was therefore not simply between promises and outcomes. It concerned the unequal distribution of political authority over the very institutions within which women’s rights were expected to be protected (Kandiyoti, 2007; Kapur, 2022).
The withdrawal of international forces in 2021 consequently raises a difficult question about the relationship between intervention and women’s empowerment. If women’s rights were understood as an intrinsic principle rather than merely an instrument of state-building, their protection should have remained central even when the geopolitical priorities of international actors changed. The fact that women’s rights became increasingly vulnerable during the transition suggests the limits of an approach in which gender equality is closely embedded within a particular political order. This does not mean that international intervention alone produced women’s rights, nor that Afghan women were passive recipients of externally created opportunities. Rather, it reveals how institutional gains can remain politically fragile when the structures supporting them are not accompanied by sufficiently broad and locally rooted forms of political authority (Suhrke, 2011; Kapur, 2022).
At the same time, interpreting 2021 only as the “failure” of women’s empowerment would reproduce another problematic assumption: that women’s agency began with international intervention and ended with the collapse of the Republic. Afghan women did not become politically active in 2001, and they did not cease to be political actors in 2021. Women continued to organise, advocate, educate, document abuses and challenge restrictions through different forms of public and private action. International organisations have also continued to document and support women’s rights advocacy under increasingly restrictive conditions (Sultani, 2024; Afary, 2024; UN Women, 2025b). UN Women, for example, reports continued consultations with Afghan women across all 34 provinces and support for women-led organisations working under severe restrictions. (Home | UN Women Transparency Portal)
This distinction is crucial. The collapse of institutions does not mean the disappearance of political agency. Indeed, the post-2021 period demonstrates why agency should not be measured only through formal institutions such as parliament, ministries or government programmes. These institutions are important, but they represent only one form of political participation. Women’s organising through civil society, diaspora networks, professional communities, educational initiatives and everyday forms of resistance can also constitute significant forms of political action, even when they are less visible to conventional indicators of democratic participation (Mahmood, 2005; Kabeer, 1999; Mohanty, 2003).
The experience of 2021 therefore complicates both triumphalist and purely pessimistic accounts of the post-2001 period. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the previous two decades produced no meaningful changes for Afghan women. Millions of girls accessed education, women entered universities and professions, and women participated in political and civic institutions that had previously been highly restricted or inaccessible (UN Women, 2024a). At the same time, it would be equally misleading to interpret these achievements as evidence that a particular interventionist model had permanently transformed the political foundations of gender relations.
The deeper issue is the relationship between institutional change and political ownership. International assistance can help establish institutions, provide resources and create opportunities. But institutions become more resilient when the people affected by them possess meaningful authority over their development and continuation. Where gender equality is primarily incorporated into externally supported state-building structures, its sustainability can become vulnerable to changes in political power. Where women themselves possess broader and more diverse forms of political, social and intellectual ownership, gender claims may have greater capacity to survive changes in formal political institutions (Kandiyoti, 2007; Suhrke, 2011; Cornwall & Rivas, 2015).
The post-2001 experience therefore invites a reconsideration of what counts as a successful women’s rights project. Success cannot be measured only by the number of girls enrolled in school, women employed in professional positions or women represented in political institutions, important as these indicators are. It must also involve questions of who owns these achievements, who has the authority to defend them, and whether women possess the political and social capacity to redefine and sustain them under changing circumstances (Kabeer, 1999; Cornwall, 2016).
Seen in this light, 2021 was not simply an endpoint. It was a moment that made visible contradictions that had existed throughout the intervention itself. Women’s rights could be simultaneously promoted as a universal principle and embedded within a geopolitical project; women could gain unprecedented institutional visibility while remaining marginal to crucial political negotiations; and international actors could expand opportunities for women while retaining considerable authority over how women’s empowerment was conceptualised (Kapur, 2022; Haqpana & Tsouroufli, 2023).
The significance of 2021, therefore, lies not only in what was lost but in what it reveals about the politics through which women’s rights had been constructed. If the goal is a more durable form of gender justice, the task is not to recreate the post-2001 intervention in another form. It is to rethink the relationship between international support and Afghan women’s political agency. That requires moving from a model in which external institutions define the terms of empowerment toward one in which Afghan women have greater authority to determine what equality, justice and liberation mean within their own diverse social and intellectual contexts (Mohanty, 2003; Kapur, 2022).
8. Conclusion
The politics of women’s rights in post-2001 Afghanistan cannot be understood simply as a story of progress followed by reversal. The two decades of international intervention produced significant changes in women’s access to education, political participation, professional life and public institutions. Afghan women themselves actively pursued many of these opportunities and used the language of rights to challenge gender inequality. Yet these achievements were also embedded within a broader interventionist project in which international institutions possessed substantial authority to define the problems facing Afghan women and the forms of empowerment through which those problems should be addressed.
This article has argued that the central contradiction was therefore not between women’s rights and international engagement as such. It was between the universal language of women’s rights and the unequal political and epistemic relationships through which those rights were interpreted and implemented. Liberal feminist principles of equality, autonomy and individual rights offered important resources for Afghan women, but their institutional dominance could narrow the range of forms of agency recognised as legitimate. Women’s experiences within families, communities, religious traditions and locally grounded networks could become less visible when empowerment was primarily understood through institutional participation, individual autonomy and measurable indicators of progress.
The post-2001 experience also demonstrates why it is insufficient to respond to this problem by simply replacing liberal feminism with a singular conception of “Afghan” or “Islamic” feminism. Afghan women do not constitute a homogeneous political category, and there is no single Afghan feminist position that can speak for all women. Feminist agency in Afghanistan has been expressed through diverse and sometimes competing languages of rights, religion, justice, community, education, political participation and social change. Recognising this plurality does not require romanticising local traditions or overlooking the gendered inequalities that exist within Afghan society. Rather, it requires recognising Afghan women as political and intellectual actors capable of negotiating, challenging and reshaping the traditions and institutions that structure their lives.
The events of 2021 made the contradictions of the interventionist model particularly visible. The collapse of the Islamic Republic and the return of the Taliban exposed the vulnerability of institutions and gains that had developed within a political order heavily supported by international actors. At the same time, Afghan women did not disappear as political subjects when that order collapsed. Their continued advocacy, organising and resistance demonstrate that women’s agency cannot be reduced to the institutions created or supported by international intervention.
The lesson, therefore, should not be that international actors have no legitimate role in supporting Afghan women’s rights. International resources, political pressure, protection mechanisms, educational opportunities and transnational advocacy can remain important. The challenge is to reconsider the relationship between support and authority. International actors should not assume that supporting women’s emancipation gives them the authority to determine what emancipation must look like.
A more sustainable politics of women’s rights requires greater space for Afghan women to define, contest and pursue gender justice on their own terms. This means taking seriously liberal feminist demands for equality and political participation while also recognising locally grounded, religious and other forms of feminist agency. It means treating Islamic feminism not as a predetermined solution, but as one contested intellectual and political tradition through which some Muslim women negotiate questions of justice and equality. It also means recognising that some women may pursue gender justice without identifying themselves through the language of feminism at all.
Ultimately, the question raised by Afghanistan is not whether women’s rights matter. They do. The more difficult question is whose knowledge, authority and conception of justice shape the politics through which those rights are pursued. Post-2001 intervention demonstrated both the possibilities and the limitations of an international project that placed women’s rights at the centre of political transformation. Its contradictions lie in the fact that women could be made highly visible as symbols of liberation while remaining less powerful in determining the political conditions under which that liberation was defined and sustained.
Rethinking the politics of women’s rights therefore requires moving beyond the assumption that Afghan women need to be liberated according to a predetermined model. It requires an approach in which international engagement supports rather than substitutes for Afghan women’s political agency, and in which different feminist, religious and locally grounded understandings of gender justice can coexist, compete and develop. The future of women’s rights in Afghanistan cannot be secured by speaking for Afghan women. It must increasingly be shaped by creating the conditions in which Afghan women can speak, organise, disagree and define their own futures.
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Salma Abid
