Description
While diplomatic negotiations form a significant part of the mainstream discourse in IR, ‘negotiation’ may be reimagined from a gender lens. Though the WPS paradigm encompasses women’s roles as peacemakers, it remains strictly restricted to women with access to the diplomatic table – a largely unreachable domain. This article re-conceptualises ‘negotiation’ beyond the diplomatic table in an attempt to locate ‘security’ through Afghan women’s narratives. In this case, 'security' can rather be construed as the lack of it. The 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the remnant of which can be drawn from over two-decades-long War on Terror and the rise of the Taliban even before, can be categorised as an epic failure of diplomacy in which the country was left to its fate without much afterthought by the international community. The first section engages with diplomatic negotiations both conceptually and historically, as witnessed in Afghanistan. Based on interviews with 15 Afghan women, who are direct/indirect witnesses of the Taliban seizure in 2021, the second section builds upon two aspects of negotiation. First, the silencing of women negotiators belonging to the Afghan civil society. Taking a cue from Rae Langton's reimagination of the speech act, the paper argues that this is a calculated silencing of women in a WPS paradigm by imposing an illocutionary disablement of women's speech act— stemming from the systematic subordination of women. Second, strategising survival as part of women’s daily negotiation with life. As emanates from a thematic analysis of narratives, security in this sense is ‘personal’ as well as ‘international’.
