International Quarterly for Asian Studies, Vol. 56 No. 2
This issue is Part 2 of a double issue on Afghan Women and the Politics of Knowledge Production.
Afghan women’s rights and voices have long been instrumentalised by both modernising and imperial projects. Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, Afghan women have lost many of the hard-won gains of the past two decades. These include denial of access to secondary and higher education, severe restrictions on employment, and forced dependence on a male chaperone, for example, when traveling. Politically, women have been completely excluded from formal government structures – meaning women's voices and their representation have effectively been erased from political discourse.
This second part of the double issue continues the project begun in the first: to foreground Afghan women not as objects of study, but as producers of knowledge in their own right. Whereas the first volume combined historical, literary, media, and diasporic perspectives, this follow-up issue focuses more closely on how Afghan women navigate, negotiate, and contest epistemic erasure from within and beyond Afghanistan. Just as the first part, this issue asks the question: Whose knowledge is considered valuable? And what does it mean to write with those who are directly affected by exclusion – rather than about them?
Find the new issue here (Open Access).
Selected articles
Afghan Women Activist Stories: Part II: Courage and Resistance – Voices from Afghanistan
Susanne Schmeidl, Raya Balki, Roqia Noor, Zindagi Noor, Malan Karlani
Navigating Complexities: Insights from Conducting Fieldwork in Afghanistan
Weeda Mehran
IQAS (International Quarterly for Asian Studies) has been Germany's leading academic journal on Asia since 1970. It provides a forum for multidisciplinary research on current and historical topics relevant to politics, economics and society in contemporary Asia. It seeks to make the results of social science research on Asia known to a broader public discourse about Asia. The contributions are intended for a public aware that the world's regions and cultures have always been interlinked and, thus, need to be understood in relation to one another. The journal appears quarterly or semi-annually as a double issue in print and an open-access version. The journal is published by the ABI.
All issues are available open access on the website of IQAS.