Gender, Violence, and Competing Sovereign Claims in Afghanistan

This chapter looks at three recent attempts to construct or shape state interventions into gender violence to demonstrate how sovereign agency operating through the Afghan state apparatus cannot be reduced to that apparatus. Instead, it shows how such agency can be — simultaneously — globally, nationally, and locally constituted, and take different and even contradictory forms. In the case of the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW law), globally constituted sovereign claims worked through the nation-state apparatus. National institutions became part of a globalized sovereign regime in which Afghan women's security was made a global concern and ultimately guaranteed by external funds and pressure. The chapter then considers how state interventions into cases of gender violence such as rape might also serve as a vehicle for factional conflicts. This perspective further adds to the problematization of state sovereignty in Afghanistan, showing that calls for it to be exercised might be less about increasing state power and more about diminishing rivals' access to it.