Description
Throughout the history of modern Afghanistan, women’s bodies have acted as the stage for the state to manifest political change and societal reform. With a distinctively similar manner, the 2001 Western intervention to Afghanistan was justified with the rhetoric of “saving the Afghan women”. My research aims to investigate how the Finnish development aid in Afghanistan has taken into consideration women and girls, and how large a portion of the Finnish ODA has been directly allocated to projects for women/girls. Furthermore, I aim to discover what kind of gender thinking the official rhetoric has represented, and how this has correlated with aid allocation. Eventually, I aim to draw conclusions about the impacts of aid in Afghanistan.
My research aims to start filling the gap of missing academic research on Finnish aid to Afghanistan, explore critically both the distribution of aid to gender-sensitive projects and the self-evaluative reports of aid agencies and governments, furthermore, contributing to the larger literature on development and (feminist) gender studies. I will utilise a mixed methods approach in combining statistical data on development aid distribution, governmental documentation and other qualitative material with interviews conducted in Finland and Afghanistan.
