Suchergebnisse

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop 'citizens' for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation.

Understanding development and inequality -- Understanding development and inequality -- Engendering development -- The business of international development -- Processes in development -- Development as dispossession -- Labor, migration and capital accumulation -- Work, mobility and uneven development -- Moments in development -- Health and population -- Gender and development technologies -- Disaster assistance and development -- Alternative development and decolonization.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by United States and coalition forces was followed by a flood of aid and development dollars and "experts" representing well over two thousand organizations--each with separate policy initiatives, geopolitical agendas, and socioeconomic interests. This book examines the everyday actions of people associated with this international effort, with a special emphasis on small players: individuals and groups who charted alternative paths outside the existing networks of aid and development. This focus highlights the complexities, complications, and contradictions at the intersection of the everyday and the geopolitical, showing how dominant geopolitical narratives influence daily life in places like Afghanistan--and what happens when the goals of aid workers or the needs of aid recipients do not fit the narrative

This article examines the geopolitics and geo-economics of security and surveillance. We comparatively focus on the effects of geopolitically powerful states – China and the United States – and their influence over the use of surveillance technologies in the name of spatial security in relatively weaker states – Nepal and Afghanistan. We use these two areas of comparison to address the similarities in security logics across disparate spaces and to highlight the everyday experiences and responses to both outside influence from powerful states and national security regimes. Through interview data from our respective qualitative research in Afghanistan and Nepal, we show how the logics of security situates particular racialized and gendered bodies as suspicious and examine how individuals living in these spaces experience, understand, and challenge these security regimes. We conclude by arguing for more comparative studies of security technologies and surveillance regimes. Additionally, we view these spaces of heightened security as potential sites for increased violence, rather than security.