С»ÆÊéÊÓƵ

In August 2021 the Taliban re-captured Kabul, the country’s capital and largest city following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal. Reminiscent of its 1996 rule; the Taliban enacted several laws and policies that sought the complete and total erasure of Afghan women and girls from public life; most notably outlawing education at the secondary level and above. Afghanistan is currently the only country in the world with a gender-based education ban, pushing thousands of women and girls to access education in clandestine, underground schools, where they risk their lives. Much of the Western media depictions of Afghan women are fraught with orientalist and neo-colonial reductionary constructions that portray Afghan women as helpless victims. However, Afghan women and girls have been on the frontlines of activism and resistance for decades throughout decades of conflict. Western white saviour narratives of human rights and education have worked to sustain ongoing military imperialism in the region; particularly in relation to discourses of women’s rights through the Western gaze. Afghan women’s long history of activism, emancipation and resistance has systematically been silenced as the West has long dictated what kind of education Afghan women and girls ought to be subject to as foundational to their state building initiatives. What is conveniently omitted by these narratives is that the Taliban itself is largely a byproduct of Western military imperialism with its origins in the Afghan Soviet war. My work seeks to map out Afghan women and girls’ counter-stories of resistance by drawing on Mignolo’s conception of ‘epistemic decolonization’ which seeks a re-centering from Western epistemic orientations and knowledge production.