Women, Peace, and Security in Afghanistan

Women, Peace and Security in Afghanistan analyses the opportunities and limitations of the WPS agenda in the context of the world’s worst erasure of women’s rights.

Afghan women have long resisted war, violence and political exclusion, yet their struggles remain largely overlooked in global peace and security debates. This book examines how Afghan women’s activism has reshaped the fight for rights and freedom. Through feminist pragmatist grounded normative theorising, Afghan women’s diverse voices, strategies, and lived realities are made visible across war, peace and politics. From international military intervention and peacemaking deals to current engagement and non-engagement with the Taliban, this book is an urgent call to recognise and support women’s agency in the face of oppression.

• First book-length scholarly analysis of the role of women, peace, and security in Afghanistan
• Amplifies the voices of local women’s resistance and struggle
• Based on interviews with Afghan women, conducted over the past 22 years

Farkhondeh Akbari is a Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW) at Monash University. She holds a PhD in Diplomatic Studies from the Australian National University.

Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations and Maureen Brunt Fellow at Monash University and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW).

“This book takes us through the journeys of Afghan women’s lives, the making and unmaking in contexts of war, peace, humanitarian efforts and security implications, captured through powerful primary interviews. Akbari and True show that while there are disjunctures between theory and practice in the WPS agenda, a grounded engagement imagined by Afghan women and led by them reveals how gender‑sensitive analysis exposes different impacts, and why humanitarian aid, as a crucial lifeline, must be gender‑responsive.

By tracing these lived experiences, the authors illuminate how intersecting identities shape women’s realities in security, and how their leadership confronts the ruptures that emerge in these contexts. This book reminds us that listening to Afghan women in all their diverse, intergenerational and transgenerational frames is not only necessary for scholarship but essential for building more responsive humanitarian and peacebuilding practices grounded in local realities and imaginations.”

Professor Bina D’Costa, Department of International Relations, The Australian National University

“This book offers a powerful and nuanced examination of the international community’s engagement with Afghan women over the past 25 years, revealing the challenges of realising the promise of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in practice. Weaving together themes of hope and betrayal, it makes a critical contribution to scholarship by tracing how WPS principles were unevenly applied in Afghanistan and why these efforts failed to embed WPS norms in practice, with devastating consequences. Through an intersectional analysis, it illuminates the diverse experiences of Afghan women of war and peace in Afghanistan and exposes the limits and weaknesses of WPS frameworks—while also pointing to their potential for renewal through the re-centering of grassroots women's activism. A timely and essential read for anyone concerned with gender, peacebuilding, global justice and the future of women and girls under the gender-apartheid regime in Afghanistan.”

Dr Jasmine Westendorf, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict and Co-Director, Initiative for Peacebuilding, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia