A peace without women is not real peace – not in Afghanistan, or anywhere.
Lina AbiRafeh discusses with Muwatin her latest book Freedom on the Frontlines: Afghan Women and the Fallacy of Liberation.
Lina AbiRafeh, PhD, is a global women’s rights expert with decades of experience worldwide. She is an advisor and former aid worker with a long track record in creating positive change for women in over 20 countries around the world. She speaks and publishes frequently on her experiences.
The interview details Lina’s experience as a women’s rights expert, aid worker, and activist. What led to her involvement with Afghanistan is explored and how this ultimately translated into a PhD and two books over the course of 25 years. She describes what the reader can expect in the new book and she also shares her thoughts on the current situation in Afghanistan.
Dr AbiRafeh was interviewed by Rebecca O’Keeffe.
If you could sum up your path/journey to this point, how would you describe it?
I am a feminist, activist, aid worker, academic – but most of all a woman committed to doing whatever she can to end violence against women in her lifetime. I started this career because I was angry, angry at the injustice that women face everywhere, all the time. I started my career in 1997 in Bangladesh and have covered 20+ countries including Haiti, Mali, and Papua New Guinea. In the field, I measured everything I did through the lens of women’s safety. If women are not safe, no one is safe.
While I try to do the work that needs doing, I am also implicated in this reality. As a woman in the field, I am not immune to violence – even as I come to help other women. The challenges are overwhelming, the successes are too few. In my entire career in the field, I asked myself the same question every day: Where do I start?! My TEDx talk is a good summary of my underlying philosophy, “Start where you stand”, meaning that we all have a responsibility to do something, starting in the small spaces that we occupy.
From 2015 to 2022, I was the Executive Director of the Arab Institute for Women, the region’s first of its kind. Since 1973, the Institute has worked at the intersection of academia and activism to advance women’s rights and gender equality in the region and around the world. I now serve the Institute – and others – as a senior advisor.
Over 30 years later, I remain a self-titled one-trick pony, committed to ending violence against women – or at least to making gains in my lifetime. In an era where violations of women’s rights are at the forefront of media and international agendas – from #MeToo to Bring Back Our Girls – it is impossible not to stand up, to take note, to care, to get really angry. I believe in the power of anger to fuel the necessary fight for equality, safety, and dignity for all women everywhere.
How did you become involved in Afghanistan?
In 2002, I flew to Afghanistan with $20,000 down my pants. I was 27 years old – enthusiastic, naive, and…terrified. The money in my pants was funding I had been given to start my work.
Women for Women International – a dynamic international NGO – had offered me the position of Country Director to establish their Afghanistan presence. I was given one year to set up the office, hire and train staff, establish and implement programs, form partnerships, find funding, and handle everything else – from security threats on the office to repairs of the constantly-malfunctioning toilet.
The women I encountered seemed weathered and war-weary, with whole lives lived in each wrinkle on their young faces. Some of them were hardly 20 years old. I knew nothing of their world. I must have looked like a child to them, uncomfortable with how much power I had. The needs for women were overwhelming and I wanted so desperately to get it right whatever ‘getting it right’ actually meant.
In one year, the office grew to sixty-five Afghan staff supporting over 3000 women. And me. Every day, I engaged with Afghan women – and men – listening and learning as they shared their concerns, experiences, and perspectives with me.
The women I encountered seemed weathered and war-weary, with whole lives lived in each wrinkle on their young faces.
How did this become not one but two books?
I was in a rare and privileged position, with an obligation to treat it respectfully and use it meaningfully, to benefit women. I became conscious of my responsibility to share the understandings that I had acquired in hopes that we might ‘do better’ for women. The story I saw was one of poverty – and of dignity. It was not about the chaddari, the blue garment that falsely came to symbolise oppression for Westerners. Such facile constructions led us to believe that all those in Western clothes are ‘liberated’.
In 2003, still in Afghanistan, I started my PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science so I could “bitch constructively,” as I called it. What I really wanted was to understand what happened, and how we might do it better.
I remained in Afghanistan until 2006 and having dubbed myself an “accidental academic” I then published a book Gender and International Aid in Afghanistan: The Politics and Effects of Intervention in 2009 built from my dissertation.
Still, I did not imagine that I would find myself writing about the country again. By 2021, I could not stay quiet. Afghanistan was not doing well, and I needed to process my thoughts. My article For Afghan women, the US rhetoric of liberation has fallen short was published on CNN in June 2021 which led to an interview, and then more interviews.
What started as an article lamenting the deterioration and abandonment of the country evolved into another book, written in the month following the Taliban (re)takeover in August 2021, as Afghanistan unravelled.
For Afghan women… I had no words. But I had to find the words.
What can the reader expect to see in the latest book?
This book measures the rhetoric of liberation and the physical and ideological occupations of Afghanistan over the twenty-year period from 2001 through 2021 through the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Afghan women who are implicated in this reality.
This book helps us all understand ‘what happened’ with Afghan women over the last 20 years, reminding us that women, politics, and the state have always been intertwined in Afghanistan, and conflicts have been fuelled by attempts to challenge or change women’s status.
In late 2001, Afghan women were at the forefront of global agendas, sustained by a mix of media coverage, humanitarian intervention, and military operations. Calls for “liberating” Afghan women were widespread. Women’s roles in Afghanistan have long been politically divisive, marked by struggles between modernisation and tradition.
It may appear that we have come full circle twenty years later, in late 2021, when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban once more. Women’s rights in Afghanistan have been stripped away, and any gains, however tenuous, now appear lost. Today, the country navigates both a humanitarian and a human rights crisis.
This book tells the story from the perspective of those who are most important – Afghan women.
In what ways is this book similar to/different from the first book?
In the first book I wrote, “this book marks the culmination of a twelve-year engagement….” Clearly it was not. The second book is now the continuation of a 25-year relationship with Afghanistan and, what started as a 2nd edition, quickly turned into a whole new book.
This new book revisits the 2009 book and continues where it left off to tell the rest of the story through October 2021. The first book started with the premise that the rhetoric of “liberation” was problematic, denying women’s agency and sidelining Afghan women. I argued that the question of women’s role in Afghanistan had always been a particularly polarising part of political discourse, linked to modernity and progress on the one hand, and preservation of tradition on the other. I wrote that Afghan women’s experiences are more complex than mere pawns in political struggles. I still believe this.
I also examined the work of the international community, my own community. I said that in terms of rhetoric, Afghanistan is arguably one of the largest gender-focused aid interventions. Everyone, everywhere knows the “story of Afghan women,” at least in part. Measuring rhetoric against action, however, the situation was not so clear.
This book is equally a reflection of my own growth as a feminist activist and accidental academic. Decades of feminist work – and feminist fire – has changed the way I work, and the way I write. Ultimately, though, my work was – and has always been – inspired by Afghan women. It is through their lived experiences that progress can be measured and regress can be understood. When I look back on more than two decades of work on women’s rights around the world, I see that it always was the women whose voices fuelled me – and fuelled countries.
It is for these women, for all women, and for me, that I write this book.
What are your thoughts on the situation now?
The situation has deteriorated as we expected. And world attention has shifted elsewhere to other crises like Ukraine. But Afghanistan is not one of those other countries, over there. It is right here. It cannot fall in and out of the news solely based on extreme victories or extreme tragedies. Because we all know who pays the price for our short-sightedness.
What’s more, we cannot afford a collective shrug and blanket excuses. “It’s their culture,” they say. No, it isn’t. Any country can be an Afghanistan. All around the world, women are still fighting for their rights – for choice and voice and freedom – even as those rights are denied or stripped away.
At the same time, not all hope is lost and there continues to be activist entry points within the country. Even if they are not obvious to us, they are already in use by Afghan women. Afghan women have always been actively liberating themselves. During the Taliban’s first occupation, women led underground schools, exposed the abuses of the Taliban to the world, and resisted any way they could. And Afghan women are doing so again today.
Protests and demonstrations are taking place across the country – despite great risk and backlash.
Just recently, the Taliban ordered girls’ secondary schools to shut just hours after they reopened, showing us that they have not changed since their first stint in power. They have imposed countless restrictions on women including banning them from many jobs and restricting their movements. They have also beaten and detained several women activists.
This, in the context of an economic collapse and a population in desperate need of humanitarian aid due to the drought. In short, denying half of its population their rights is only going to expedite a collapse from which Afghanistan will need generations to recover.
we cannot afford a collective shrug and blanket excuses. “It’s their culture,” they say. No, it isn’t. Any country can be an Afghanistan. All around the world, women are still fighting for their rights – for choice and voice and freedom – even as those rights are denied or stripped away.
So how can we help them to advance? Are we doing whatever we can to support their agenda?
Various international bodies have condemned the Taliban’s actions, but it is not enough. The repercussions should be stronger. A clear message from world leaders with definite punishment that holds the Taliban accountable is needed. Examples could include imposing travel sanctions on Taliban leaders, sanctions on Taliban finances, and publicly opposing the Taliban in a unified international voice. Donors need to hold the Taliban to their commitments of respecting women’s rights and governments need to push for human rights monitoring to be able to function and work freely in the country.
Restricting education breaches international human rights obligations so the international community should make education and women’s rights a sticking point in negotiations. Any engagement with the Taliban needs to have the precondition of reopening schools – at the very least.
Any future negotiations should also include civil society movements – and women. We can help amplify their voices so they can dictate the direction of the new Afghanistan and control their own destinies. Afghan women are an underutilised force – let them lead, and Afghanistan will have peace.
A peace without women is not real peace – not in Afghanistan, or anywhere.
What are you currently working on?
I create innovative solutions to global women’s rights challenges through my advisory service, supporting several organisations and companies at a senior level on how to advance women’s rights.
I speak frequently on global stages – to anyone who will listen! I’ve been featured on CNN, BBC, TEDx, and Good Morning America, amongst others.
I publish on a range of women’s rights issues, for instance on the need for a feminist response to the COVID-19 pandemic and advocating for women’s leadership. I blog and write as much as I can – to help spread the message. And, I’m working on a memoir – to be released once I find a publisher!
Any parting message?
We have to see women’s rights as our RIGHT – and as a collective responsibility and a collective duty. I speak in my TED talk about taking it personally, about seeing the role that we all play in being agents of positive change for women and girls. We know that inequality isn’t just a problem “over there” for “other women” – it is everywhere, all around us. To make it concrete, we know that one in three women and girls will experience some form of violence in their lifetime. This cuts across every country, culture, and content – without exception. Even one case of violence is one too many. We know that equality is our inherent right. And it is better for all of us. It is worth repeating what we already know: None of us can be free unless ALL of us are free.
You can follow Lina AbiRafeh’s work on her website or on her Blog or on her Medium page.
Her book “Freedom on the Frontlines: Afghan Women and the Fallacy of Liberation” can be found on Amazon.
