I am a woman. My life has been a constant battle for the right to exist and matter, and so have been the lives of my mother and my mother’s mother. This battle is intrinsic to our being as women, so much that life seems potentially purposeless without it. Though I doubt I’d ever witness purposeless life, I want to make an attempt at imagining progress without it. I am hoping to put my garb of womanhood and my conviction to women’s rights aside in order to see the prospects of development for my country. As an Afghan woman with a personal and professional stake in improvement of human conditions, I want to question the Women’s Rights Based Approach (WRBA) to development in the context of Afghanistan. I do not know what I will find out. One may call it lack of courage or inconsistency of thought, but I want to remain open to revelations of any nature at any point in time, and therefore, this paper will not have a conclusion of content.
My interpretation of the application of the Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) to women is that in the world of development, women’s rights are cross-cutting and women empowerment is non-negotiable.[1] But the development world is unique and its characteristics are not shared by most worlds of developing countries, including Afghanistan. At the risk of over-simplification, I compare the development world with the laboratory rat, kept and bred for the purpose of finding solution to the entire rat community’s problems, only to find out later, how different other rats are, thus making the cross application of solutions impossible.[2] Afghanistan in 2001 was like a rat, out on its own in the wild for far too long. Addressing her problems required country specific study and not mere application of solution packages from elsewhere. But there was no time for such a study. The world hurried to emancipate Afghan women after 9/11, and engaged with Afghanistan, but only politically and financially. A genuine social engagement with a willingness to listen and learn lacks even today.
The basis of this political and financial engagement was the assumption that communities’ internal working could be governed by the state. The reality is that communities have their own age old internal informal governance system. This system is based on indigenous power relations that are inherent in understanding communities or mobilizing them for altering the system, if they want to.[3] This understanding cannot come without a genuine social engagement, a reality that explains the externality and outsider nature of the WRBA in relation to Afghan communities.
The application of the WRBA could take two forms. It could either be employed by people to claim needs driven rights or by governments in order to justify their actions and international interventions. The case of Afghanistan falls in both categories. I will discuss the latter first.
WRBA: Government’s Prerogative to Justify Intervention
For the world the initial event of the global intervention in Afghanistan was marked by 9/11. For development in Afghanistan it was the radio address of the First Lady Laura Bush on November 17, 2001, which was significant in determining the pace and nature of this intervention in the years to come. In the speech, women and the cause of women emancipation and empowerment was used to justify American Intervention.[4] In addition, by blurring the lines between centuries old patriarchal social system and the Taliban imposed radical restrictions, this speech depicted a picture quite typical of one perceived of under-developed countries: uncivilized and in need of modernization.
This is not to blame one woman or her advisers, because human mind remembers negative phenomena more than positive.[5] Taliban’s suppression of women’s rights was a fresh negative memory. Laura’s address was seductive. Together they led the post 9/11 interveners in Afghanistan to think that the grave violence of women’s rights was a recent phenomenon, caused by the Taliban, and one which could be done away with by removing the Taliban. Now, we may find this hilarious, but at that point many good hearted people genuinely believed in this. Driven by this perceived causation between the problem and the source, women empowerment was treated as an objective achievable in a short period of time, discounting centuries old practices, norms and values that shape women’s role in the Afghan society. In the words of the MIT Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal about the Declaration of the Right to Development, it gave the international community and its Afghan counterparts the right to “pollute rivers, displace people and create development refugees” in total disregard of social or environmental consequences.[6] What came as a result was 10 years of technical fixes, all in the name of women empowerment.
From a leadership perspective, there were two maladaptive patterns at play. The first was seeking solutions from development experts who had authority in the realm of development. The second was the immediate use of a response appropriate to other situations, which lacked applicability in the case of Afghanistan.[7] The use of the WRBA was one such example, which further complicated the already complex situation by increasing the levels of confrontation for women as a vulnerable group, making it even harder to explore other negotiation possibilities.[8]
The impact of the WRBA on the relationship between the people and the government is significant. The Afghan government is already overburdened with the lack of human and financial capital, weak institutions and Afghans’ extreme dependence on authority for solutions. Driven by the exercise of counterfeit leadership and consequently putting false tasks in front of the communities[9], the adoption of the WRBA has been the cherry on top and has further enhanced antagonism with the government.[10]
For example the issue of peace and reconciliation faces a deadlock at this point, mainly because national and international women’s rights groups have shaped the debate in a way that it has become more about women and less about peace and reconciliation for the nation at large. The result is not just a deadlock, but also a backlash on women’s basic freedoms. At this point, in case of the return of a repressive group like Taliban, women’s right to education, work and travel without a male companion seems to be on top of the negotiable items. This is evident from the March 3, 2012 Resolution of the Ulema Council of Afghanistan, which despite being contrary to the Afghan Constitution of 2004, Afghan government’s commitment to international human rights instruments and the provisions of the Violence against Women Act,[11] was publicly backed by President Karzai.[12]
Improving Afghan women’s conditions of life is the greater purpose, not merely getting the state acknowledgement of women’s rights on paper, which seems to be the task that the advocates of the WRBA are stuck with.
I do not want to underestimate efforts, under-value resources, doubt intentions or require a justification for the cause of economic development in Afghanistan.[13] I am only listening to the undercurrents of the present conditions, which remain to be the same after ten years of global intervention. The frame of women empowerment and the WRBA seem to have failed the cause of development for all and for women, who continue to lack rights, avenues for participation and security.[14]
As cliché as it is, it is a fact and an over-taken-for-granted one: Women make half of the world population. Therefore, it is only fair to look at development challenges through the WRBA lens. However, the use of this lens has led to an over-magnification of the gender dimensions at the cost of other frames such as ethnicity, class and religion.[15] Afghanistan has never been Vanuatu, and can never be given the degree of social, political, economic and cultural tensions she has and is still facing. This is evident from the existing layers of religious and ethnic norms and values. Islam as the official religion of the country offers one set of norms and values. Ethnic codes such as the Pashtunwali add another layer to this. Given the existing complexity of conditions in Afghanistan, the introduction of the WRBA overburdened the system with yet another set of norms to consider and implement. This transformed Afghanistan to a playground where a number of games were played simultaneously.[16] It is obvious that none of the games got played to the end and none of the teams were happy. This lack of satisfaction is most evident in the behavior of young men, who feel marginalized and thus, deny women’s capacity and talent even more. Successful female scholarship applicants are greeted by their male competitors with: “Congratulations! But of course you’d get it, you are a woman.[17]”
Given the antiquity of the informal social institutions in Afghanistan, the consequence of a genuine engagement with them can only be predicted not determined. However, this is not the case with the WRBA, which is clear on the end results.[18] This confidence in the WRBA’s capacity to not only carry the water but also make a river in Afghanistan is alarming; because in reality they are only going to try to join a river that has flown for ages, where the direction of the flow of that river cannot be determined by the outside interveners.
These set of challenges are in addition to the adoption of a technical approach to a set of adaptive development problems, a most common form of misdiagnosis. In the process of diagnosing the problem, there could have been three situational types, of which two have been ignored. It has been assumed that there existed a clear definition of the problem, a clear understanding of what the solution might be and how it is going to be implemented, where are the primary locus of responsibility for the work that needs to be done to address problems, and what that work is. While in most cases, the reality is that the last three or all of the above were unclear situations that called for long term learning.[19] As a result, the genuine purpose of improving conditions of life got lost. What remained was repetitive, uncreative and technical set of procedures or products hastily applied to produce donor reports and congress papers.
WRBA: People’s Prerogative to Justify Rights
Rajagopal questions the use of the tool of human rights as the sole language for development and emancipation of under-developed communities.[20] I think that by doing this, he captures the essence of the discourse that the development practitioners should engage in, if their purpose is a meaningful and genuine engagement with social institutions in order to improve human conditions. I am referring to a discourse of questioning, listening and learning. Looking at the list of the Constitutional Fundamental Rights[21] I wonder if we should add one other right to this list: The right to decide what rights to own and to prioritize which rights to struggle for. The most common mistake that genuine development practitioners make is to assume that they know the needs of the beneficiary communities and thus can determine their rights. In the case of Afghanistan, I think, having the right to put nail polish or not is not really an important right to focus human and financial resources on. There is more to women’s emancipation than the right to color our nails.[22] Another example is the current debate around Saudi women’s right to driving, which the Saudi Princess, in the light of deeper and more serious issues that Saudi women face, considers to be ill timed.[23] The infatuation with superficial issues seems to have become a basic characteristic of women’s rights movements.
This brings us to the practical values that the WRBA claims to pursue. One such claim is around the creation of “greater human agency by relating rights to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”[24] I couldn’t agree more with Frances Cleaver, who finds it difficult to understand how the WRBA advocates fail to see the relational and practical nature of the process of creating agency. Getting state acknowledgement of rights and transforming that into national and local laws is only a small technical part of the larger process. The real sweat and tear process begins and depends on the actual ground where agency is exercised: practical life of people. At the playground of practical life, the rules of informal institutions apply, not so much the state acknowledged set of rights coming from the above.[25]
Supposing that the WRBA advocates are right, how are we going to deal with their lack of readiness to understand the hierarchy of rights, without which prioritizing becomes impossible and planning and programming complicated?[26]
This paper has no conclusion, as I said in the beginning. Nevertheless I’d say the following: Intentions are not enough to guarantee improvement. It is very easy to get lost in the technicalities of an activity. It is easy to fail to see beyond the reports that we write, papers that we publish and applause that we receive. They are all very seductive and satisfying. But a process of consistently revisiting the purpose of the intervention is critical in not losing sight of the value we want to preserve: life.
[1] “A human rights-based approach is a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights. It seeks to analyze inequalities which lie at the heart of development problems and redress discriminatory practices and unjust distributions of power that impede development progress.” Frequently Asked Questions on Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, 2006. http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FAQen.pdf
[2] Reference is given to the lecture delivered by Professor Michael Woolcock, PED308, March 30, 2012.
[3] Patel, Sheela and Mitlin, Diana, Re-interpreting the Rights Based Approach: A Grassroots Perspective on Rights and Development, in Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 108.
[4] Abu-Lughod, Lila, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others, in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender and Development, 2nd Edition Reader, (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2011), 90.
[5] Clifford Nass quoted by Alina Tugend, Praise is Fleeting, but Brickbats We Recall, New York Times, March 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-remember-negative-events-more-than-positive-ones.html?emc=eta1
[6] Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 220.
[7] Ronald Heifetz, Leadership without Easy Answers, (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1994), 73.
[8] Hickey, Sam and Mitlin, Diana, Potential and Pitfalls of Rights Based Approaches to Deelopment, in Sam Hickey and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 212.
[9] Dean Williams, Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face their Toughest Challenges, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005), 14.
[10] Patel, Sheela and Mitlin, Diana, Re-interpreting the Rights Based Approach: A Grassroots Perspective on Rights and Development, in Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 120.
[11] Press Release on the Resolution Proclaimed, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, March 7, 2012, http://www.aihrc.org.af/en/press-release/1031/press-release-on-the-resolution-proclaimed.html
[12] Associated Press in Kabul, Hamid Karzai backs Cleric’s Move to Limit Afghan Women’s Rights, The Guardian, March 6, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/06/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-womens-rights
[13] Moghadam, Valentine M. Peace Building and Reconstruction with Women: Reflections on Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender and Development, 2nd Edition Reader, (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2011), 74.
[14] Moghadam, Valentine M. Peace Building and Reconstruction with Women: Reflections on Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender and Development, 2nd Edition Reader, (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2011), 75.
[15] White, Sarah C., The Gender “Lens”: A Racial Blinder, in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender and Development, 2nd Edition Reader, (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2011), 98.
[16] Reference is given to the lecture delivered by Professor Michael Woolcock, PED308, April 6, 2012.
[17] Reference is given to various informal discussions with unsuccessful male Fulbright applicants in Kabul, 2009.
[18] Reference is given to the lecture delivered by Professor Michael Woolcock, PED308, April 6, 2012.
[19] Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1994), 76.
[20] Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 232.
[21] Article 22-59, Chapter 2, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, http://www.afghanembassy.com.pl/cms/uploads/images/Constitution/The%20Constitution.pdf
[22] Helen Jones, Watching Out: Visible Rights for Women, Surveillance and Society, 2004, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(4)/visiblerights.pdf
[23] Basma Bint Saud Bin Abdulaziz, What I’d change about my Country, BBC News, April 8, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17446831
[24] Drinkwater, Michael, “We are also Human”: Identity and Power in Gender Relations, in Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 146.
[25] Cleaver, Frances, Re-thinking Agency, Rights and Natural Resource Management, in Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 141.
[26] Munro Lauchlan T., “The Human Rights based Approach to Programming”: A Contradiction in Terms, in Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009), 202.
Bibliography
Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender and Development, 2nd Edition Reader, (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2011).
Sam Hicky and Diana Mitlin, Rights Based Approaches to Development: Exploring The Potential and Pitfalls, (Virginia: Kumarian Press, 2009).
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1994).
Questions on Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, 2006. http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FAQen.pdf
Michael Woolcock, PED 308 Lectures, Weeks 9th and 10th.
Clifford Nass quoted by Alina Tugend, Praise is Fleeting, but Brickbats We Recall, New York Times, March 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-remember-negative-events-more-than-positive-ones.html?emc=eta1
Press Release on the Resolution Proclaimed, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, March 7, 2012, http://www.aihrc.org.af/en/press-release/1031/press-release-on-the-resolution-proclaimed.html
Associated Press in Kabul, Hamid Karzai backs Cleric’s Move to Limit Afghan Women’s Rights, The Guardian, March 6, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/06/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-womens-rights
Helen Jones, Watching Out: Visible Rights for Women, Surveillance and Society, 2004, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(4)/visiblerights.pdf
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, http://www.afghanembassy.com.pl/cms/uploads/images/Constitution/The%20Constitution.pdf
Dean Williams, Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face their Toughest Challenges, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).