Description
Feminists have long critiqued the framing of war in Afghanistan as salvation for Afghan women and have pointed to the problematic co-optation of gender within the international statebuilding project in the country more broadly. The hasty abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021, further demonstrates the problematics around ‘feminist’ militarism. This paper argues that the war and international withdrawal shed particular light on critiques of ‘feminism’ in foreign policy, including questions of sustainability, instrumentalism, racialised imaginaries, and the structural depoliticization of feminist ideas. However, equally, the particularities of everyday resistance demonstrated by Afghan women and their allies, were generated, even facilitated, within the compromised space of war, and bound up with the international project and notions of the liberal peace. The feminist space and work that did manage to flourish in Afghanistan since 2001, the paper suggests, was very specifically undercut by the messy withdrawal of international troops and funding, and that betrayal continues to be a source of suffering and crisis in Afghanistan, negating even the compromised possibilities of ‘feminist’ militarism.
Keywords: Feminist; Militarism; Afghanistan; withdrawal; statebuilding
