Testing the Limits of Human Rights’ Dynamism: A Comparative Study of Afghan Women’s Rights Under the Taliban Regimes (1996,2021)

Introduction

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) regards human rights as a modern and universal phenomenon which should be uniformly implemented in all societies. This is called the modern conception of human rights. Contrary to the UDHR’s notion, contemporary scholarship has attempted to provide more diverse, dynamic and context-oriented accounts of human rights. In 1999, John Rawls suggested the postmodern idea of human rights and argued that human rights should be assigned a thinner conception that is conscious of peculiarities of different societies and cultural milieus. This perspective, he argued, would be conducive to better implementation of the human rights law, as it familiarises different societies with the broad meaning of rights (Ivic, 2010; Rawls, 1999). Rawls’s idea is ensued by similar interpretations of this debate. For instance, David Ingram (2018) has recently advocated for a more ‘capable’ approach to human rights which guarantees access to a wide range of opportunities and freedoms for different persons and communities. In the same line of argument, Moka-Mubelo (2019) calls for a contextually sensitive approach to human rights which is directly concerned with the kind of society that people live in. So understood, human rights pick up force when different states and cultures decide to implement them within their specific sociocultural borders (Hunt, 2008; Kohen, 2007).

Despite their utility, theories of Rawls and the like-minded scholars are nevertheless restricted by a preoccupation with macro-level variation of human rights among different societies. They fail to account for the evolution of human rights within the same society from time to time, and the factors which lead to such evolution. The aim of this article is not to review what the literature, particularly Rawls and the UDHR, suggest about the dynamism of human rights. Rather, it is to offer a case-study-based argument that would spark the sense of need to update the literature on human rights’ dynamism and to consequently recommend a middle ground between modern and postmodern theories of human rights—a framework through which the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) and the international community may work together to realise women’s rights in the post-2021 Afghanistan.

Here, the article argues that the dynamism of human rights should not be limited to the ways different cultures decide to implement them, and that there are strong factors which stimulate the variation of the understanding of human rights, and hereby their implementation, within a single society and regime. Therefore, regimes and governments should not ignore the effects of these factors on the evolution of human rights. I draw how particular variants and subsections of rights develop within a specific sociocultural milieu and become fundamental human rights. To do so, I use the case study of Afghan women’s rights under the Taliban regimes of 1996 and 2021, respectively. The second section discusses Afghan women’s conception of their basic rights during the first rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. The third section paints the developments in the field of women’s rights in Afghanistan in the post-2001 context, and the external factors which paved the way for these developments. The fourth section covers the current ideas of Afghan women about their rights, under the new Taliban regime (IEA) of 2021. The data for this part is gathered from a survey conducted by the author in September 2021, with 200 female respondents from different provinces of Afghanistan. ¹ The fifth section explores the middle ground between modern and postmodern notions of human rights, through which the IEA and international community can cooperate to implement women’s rights in Afghanistan. The sixth section concludes.

Afghan Women’s Rights Under the First Taliban Rule (1996–2001)

Afghanistan got embroiled in a civil war following the collapse of its Soviet-led government in 1992 (Arreguin-Toft, 2009; Christia, 2012; Elias, 2020). The Taliban were one of the leading factions of the Afghan civil war, who ultimately defeated mujahideen ² , the other warring side, and captured the rule over Afghanistan in 1996 (Gohari, 2001; Matinuddin, 1999).

The Taliban comprised of Sunni Islamist men who studied Islamic teachings in the Afghan and Pakistani madrasas ³ (Johnson, 2017). They held power over Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. During this period, they enforced a strict form of sharia (Islamic law; Matinuddin, 1999). The implementation of their specific interpretation of the Islamic law in Afghanistan led to the violation of the rights of many Afghans, especially those of women (Skain, 2002). Women made up 70% of teachers, 40% of doctors, over half of school students and worked in all areas of the workforce before the Taliban took control over Kabul (Ellis, 2000). Taliban, however, subjected women to restrictions. The international community viewed these restrictions as denying Afghan women their most basic and fundamental human rights, such as the right to employment, healthcare, social activities and education (Gohari, 2001). Although Article 26 of the UDHR provided that ‘everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages’, even homeschooling was banned for women and girls during the first Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The method of education mentioned in this Article covers any kind of formal and informal training provided by schools and educational institutions, including home schools. The type of education mentioned here is also general and encompasses training of any kind of subjects and fields including house affairs. At least 100 girls’ schools in Kabul which were providing the young women and girls with training in skills that helped them in house affairs were also ordered to shut.

However, in some areas, basic education was allowed only for female children. The Taliban had set new guidelines that education must be limited to girls under the age of eight, and it must be confined to the teachings of Holy Qur’an (Physicians for Human Rights, 1998). A few underground home schools for young girls operated in Kabul and other places. Nevertheless, even women who organised home schools ran the possibility of losing their lives or being severely beaten by the Taliban forces (Skain, 2002).

The banning of employment for women deprived them of the ability to afford their very basic needs. Nearly 50,000 women had lost their male breadwinners during the Afghan civil war and had to beg in streets in order to feed their children and family members (US Department of State, 2001). While Article 23 of the UDHR granted to all human beings the right to ‘work, free choice of employment, just and favorable conditions of work, and protection against unemployment’, the Taliban had banned any kind of employment for women including jobs in the health sector. This Article especially recognised for everyone the right to protection against unemployment. That being said, during the Taliban’s first rule, women did not only suffer from unemployment, but, due to the lethal consequences of the civil war, most of them also suffered from the lack of a male guardian who could work and feed their family and children.

In 2000, the Taliban also took away several career options for women to work with foreign agencies. Women were no longer permitted to work for the United Nations (UN) or non-governmental organisations (NGOs; Paik, 1997). In this way, the Taliban also curtailed women’s access to medical treatment. Female doctors were fired from their jobs, and women could not be examined by male doctors. This took a drastic toll on women’s health and well-being. The majority of pregnant women gave delivery at home with the help of amateur midwives (Physicians for Human Rights, 1998). Article 25 of the UDHR emphasised that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family’. While the provisions of this Article covered access to hospitals, doctors, sanitation, medicine and nurses, the Taliban deprived women of their career as doctors and allowed women to use hospitals only if they were accompanied by a male chaperone, no matter how severe their conditions were. The Article also ensured that ‘Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance’. These being said, in Afghanistan, mothers and newborn babies were deprived of basic healthcare services. In addition, due to the lack of female doctors, the rate of maternal mortality was also considerably high. Following international outrage over this issue, the Taliban only allowed a few female doctors and nurses to work, while hospitals still had separate wards for women (Physicians for Human Rights, 1998).

In September 1996, women were officially announced to have been denied education and that they should no longer be looking for job opportunities. The Taliban believed that the developed countries were violating women’s honour by offering them chances to work in mixed-sex environments (Gohari, 2001). They also argued that the international community was disgracing the Afghan women by removing their niqab (face veil) and exposing them to the public, under the veil of human rights (Gohari, 2001). Carrying face veils was burdensome for women, as they could not see their surroundings while walking and could not breathe properly. Thus, their right to proper and adequate clothing was violated by the Taliban’s imposed dress code. Furthermore, the Taliban restricted women’s ability to roam around the city (Griffin, 2001). According to a researcher working for the Terre de Hommes, approximately 400 girls living in one of Kabul’s largest orphanages were locked inside for 1 year (Griffin, 2001). Article 13 of the UDHR recognised for everyone the right to ‘freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state’. The provisions of the Article were general and did not put any restriction or condition for movement. In addition to the violation of the freedom of movement, the case of girls living in the orphanage also attested to a one-year-long detention, though not directly named or labelled as ‘detention’. According to Article 9 of the UDHR, ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile’. When they are not implemented on the basis of an authorised court’s decision, detention, arrest and exile are arbitrary and illegal. The girls’ case portrays how Taliban used to not only violate basic human rights but also impose penalties without any legal basis.

In a similar vein, the closure of 32 female public baths (hammam) by the Taliban in October 1996 restricted women’s access to sanitation and good hygiene (Maley, 2001). For women of some deprived families, the public bathhouses provided the only source of the running water (Ellis, 2000). Women were also banned from washing clothes near rivers and public places, given that they might be seen by the namahram (stranger men; Rawa, n.d.). While not being directly recognised, the right to access to clean water, sanitation and good hygiene is covered by Article 25 of the UDHR, under the right to ‘a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being’. Given that women of the rural areas could not have access to any other source of water for sanitary purposes, the Taliban thus deprived them of their basic right to have access to their only water source by closing public bathhouses and banning the usage of river waters.

Female passengers could not ride in public buses and taxis without male relatives. They could only ride on special buses designated for them, which had thick curtains drawn over the windows so that no one on the street could see them (Marsden, 1998). These limitations violated women’s right to free movement, recognised under Article 13 of the UDHR. Due to its general rhetoric, the freedom of movement mentioned in this Article can be extended to women’s free choice of reaching their destination via desired vehicle or by walking. Similarly, the passenger has the free will to choose whether they want to be accompanied by someone or not.

Appearance and public relations, it appears, were two of the most contentious problems concerning women that drew the Taliban’s attention. They did not permit women to use cosmetics and perfumes, talk to men who were strangers, laugh loudly in public, wear high heels, appear in the balconies of their homes, and appear on the radio and television (Skain, 2002). According to the Taliban’s views, women should hide their physical attractiveness from men, who are supposed to be sexually attracted to them (Maley, 2001). The ordered outfit for women to wear outdoors was an all-covering burqa, a long capacious garment that masks the women’s body from head to toe. The burqa was a physical and psychological hardship, as well as economically burdensome for many women. Afghan women did not use burqa before the Taliban, so markets had to import some from the nearby Pakistani bazaars. Some women had to wait too long for their turn to go out in certain circumstances, as the entire neighbourhoods shared a single burqa (US Department of State, 2001).

Imposing burqas on women violated the provisions of Article 25 of the UDHR regarding human beings’ right to ‘adequate clothing…’. According to the Legal Dictionary, the legal meaning of ‘adequate’ is ‘suitable to the case or occasion’. This ‘case’ can also cover a human being’s beliefs, physical state which they are in and the free will to choose their outfit.

The restrictions were not, however, only specific to outdoors life. One year after their takeover, in 1997, the Taliban announced that the house residents should completely cover their windows, so that women could not be seen from outside (Gohari, 2001). Therefore, women used to live inside their houses, without having the right to look outside or even see the light. While the first Article of the UDHR emphasises that all human beings were born free, women of the first Taliban era were locked inside houses without any interaction with the outside world.

These being said, unlike women’s objections to the Taliban’s ongoing rule in Afghanistan, there is no evidence of them protesting and objecting to the Taliban’s restrictions between 1996 and 2001. This lack of resistance was the result of women’s limited perspective towards their rights in that period (Skain, 2002). Women did not have much information about human rights, education and participation in sociopolitical activities (Skain, 2002). There were also no external factors, that is, international intervention, enabling women to realise the importance and necessity of these phenomena. Media coverage was very low, and most ordinary Afghans did not have access to radios, televisions and newspapers (Iftikhar, 2006). Therefore, women were completely closed to change and evolution in their everyday life.

Afghan Women’s Rights in the Post-2001 Context: Analysing the External Factors

In 2001, following the allegations that the Taliban had harboured Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda whose terror group was responsible for the 11 September attacks, the USA started a military mission in Afghanistan in order to oust the Taliban from power (De Niro, 2021). After the Taliban rule fell apart, the international community along with the USA exerted a significant impact on the Afghan politics and paved the way for the formation of a new Afghan interim government in 2001 (Malkasian, 2021). The USA declared its basis for entering Afghanistan as ‘promoting human rights, women rights, and consolidating democracy’ (Malkasian, 2021). The US mission also undertook a nation-building and stabilisation effort, with a focus on improving the lives of Afghan women and girls (Malkasian, 2021). It supported the new Afghan administration to bring reforms with regard to human rights and women’s rights. In order to enhance human rights, particularly women’s rights, the new Afghan government achieved many legislative and institutional advancements. As a first step towards safeguarding women’s rights, freedoms, and sociopolitical presence in the Afghan society and politics, the interim administration established the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) in late 2001. MOWA became the principal agency in Afghanistan for promoting women’s rights and advancement, ensuring that women’s legal, economic, social, political and civic rights, including the right to be free of all types of violence and discrimination, were recognised, promoted and realised (Library of Congress, n.d.).

In late 2001, US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the Afghan Women and Children Relief Bill of 2001. The US Congress had recognised the necessity of promoting women’s basic rights such as education, freedom of expression, access to work and freedom of movement, following the Taliban’s five-year-long restriction on women (Congress.Gov, 2001). The Congress published data suggesting that the Taliban’s limitations on women’s rights between 1996 and 2001 had left in their wake drastic consequences. For example, thousands of Afghan women and girls were habitually denied healthcare as of May 1998, when only 20% of hospital medical and surgical beds dedicated to adults were accessible for women (Congress.Gov, 2001). In addition, women were not allowed to leave their houses unless accompanied by a male relative. Many mothers were unable to obtain basic essentials such as healthcare and food for their children as a result of this. Doctors, almost all of whom were men, were also forbidden from providing some forms of care that the Taliban had deemed inappropriate during their first period of government in Afghanistan (Congress.Gov, 2001). Against this backdrop, in order to address these damages, the mentioned bill was aimed at authorising US humanitarian aid expenditures for women and children’s healthcare and education. The bill was co-sponsored by 13 female American senators, then signed and enforced by former US President George W. Bush (The White House (President George W. Bush), 2001). Since then, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of State and the Department of Defense have disbursed nearly $800 million for programmes primarily aimed at assisting Afghan women and another $4 billion for programmes that included women’s advancement (Clayton & Collins, 2021).

With the aid of external enablers such as foreign constitutional lawyers, UN agencies and international women’s rights advisors, the interim government adopted a new Constitution in January 2004. As it was expected, the Constitution reflected the international human rights values and officially recognised for Afghan women all kinds of legal rights as citizens. Article 22 clearly prohibited any kind of discrimination between Afghan men and women and deemed them ‘all equal before the law’. Thereby, it re-affirmed Articles 1 and 2 of the UDHR regarding the rights to equality and non-discrimination between human beings.

The phrase ‘equal before the law’ which is mentioned in Article 22 of the 2004 Constitution refers to the equality in terms of both rights and obligations. Accordingly, as Afghan citizens, women and men were equally required to fulfil their duties with regard to the state. Reciprocally, the state was obliged to equally respect and implement the rights of Afghan men and women. Article 44 obliged the government to ‘implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women’. It means that the state had intended to eliminate gender disparities in education. During the Taliban’s leadership in 1996, there was already a significant divide between educated men and women. To close this imbalance, the state had aimed to expand not only women’s educational areas but also economic opportunities for them. The international community, particularly the USA, backed the former government’s ambitions. For the past 20 years, the US government and international donors have considered investing in Afghan women to be a key priority of foreign assistance programmes. Women empowerment was emphasised throughout USAID’s vast portfolio in Afghanistan. One of the largest US educati onal projects for Afghan women was the USAID Promote project. Promote was a five-year programme aimed at improving Afghan women’s education, advancement and training. It intended to improve women’s participation in civil society, increase female economic participation, increase the number of women in decision-making positions within the Afghan government, and assist women in developing business and managerial skills (USAID, 2014). Women in the Economy (WIE) was another task order under USAID’s Promote initiative, a collaboration between the former Afghan government and USAID to secure Afghan women’s gains since 2001 while equipping a new generation of Afghan women with the leadership skills needed to contribute to Afghanistan’s development in governance, civil society and the economy (World Bank Group, 2017).

From its offices in five economic zones, WIE worked in 30 Afghan regions. The programme aided women-owned firms and businesses with at least 30% female employees in improving their performance, income growth and long-term viability. To that purpose, WIE provided technical assistance, industry-specific business skills training, and financial and market access to help businesses expand. It assisted women aged 18 years and above in finding new or better jobs through market-driven job skills training and work experience placements in internships, apprenticeships and on-the-job training activities (World Bank Group, 2017).

Coming back to the Constitution, it had also guaranteed women’s political participation in the government by both elective and non-elective measures (elections and direct appointment by the president). Article 83 provided that the election laws should ‘adopt measures to attain, through the electorate system … on average, at least two females as elected members of the House of People (the lower branch of Afghanistan’s former parliament) from each province’. In similar vein, Article 84 obliged the president to appoint 50% of the House of Elders (the upper branch of Afghanistan’s former parliament) representatives from among women. Parliamentary elections were held in 2005, one year after the adoption of the Constitution, as a result of which 20, among others, female representatives were elected from 9 provinces (Joint Electoral Management Body, 2005). Also in 2015, the House of Elders consisted of 18 female representatives, which made 26.47% of the House (Inter-Parliamentary Union, n.d.). The successful representation of women in Karzai’s newly formed cabinet was also praised by many women’s rights activists and human rights groups (Motevalli, 2004). Karzai appointed Massouda Jalal, his only female opponent in the presidential election as the Minister of Women’s Affairs, Sediqa Balkhi as the Minister of Martyrs and the Disabled, Amina Afzali as the Minister of Youth’s Affairs, and Sima Samar as the Chair of the Human Rights Commission (DPA, 2004).

Later in 2009, Karzai decreed a separate Law on Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW). Rape, battery, forced marriage, restricting women from acquiring property, and banning a woman or girl from going to school or employment were all considered criminal charges under this law, and women were able to file complaints for such incidents under the law (Official Gazette, 2009). Thereby, the right to be free from violence was also recognised as a basic right for the Afghan women. The right to freedom from violence was not mentioned in the UDHR. Rather, it is developed by the former Afghan government and the international community as a variant of the right to freedom, equality and dignity for Afghan women after them tolerating many forms of physical, mental and structural violence during the first period of the Taliban rule.

The EVAW law also regulated the obligations of several ministries with regard to EVAW, including the MOWA, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministries of Education and Higher Education, Ministry of Information and Culture, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Interior Affairs, and the Ministry of Public Health (Official Gazette, 2009). In addition, the EWAV High Commission was established under the law with the goal of successfully combatting violence and fostering coordination among governmental, non-governmental and relevant groups (Official Gazette, 2009).

The aforementioned achievements are only a part of what Afghan women have gained since 2001. With the aid of international community, the former Afghan governments since 2001 not only respected and implemented women’s rights through various legal, political and administrative means but also worked towards promoting and enhancing women’s awareness about their rights. In the long run, these initiatives and endeavours made Afghan women cognizant of their rights and freedoms and gradually nurtured a brand-new generation of women and girls with considerably different and wider perspectives towards their legal rights than the women of the first Taliban era in Afghanistan. A survey about ‘Afghan women’s rights in the post-2021 context’ which was conducted by the author in September 2021 across different zones of Afghanistan reveals that 150 out of 200 (75.4%) respondents believe that following the fall of Taliban’s regime in 2001, the international community, particularly the USA, has considerably contributed to the promotion of women’s rights and freedom in Afghanistan (Jami, 2021). ⁴ The survey also included women who witnessed the first Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Afghan Women’s Rights Under the IEA

Following the Taliban’s extraordinarily swift capture of Kabul, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed on 15 August 2021. Taliban forces entered the Presidential Palace, took the seat of power and declared the establishment of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan (Mohamed & Allahoum, 2021). Taliban’s newly formed provisional cabinet contains no women, and the country’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been disbanded by the new rulers (Bloch, 2022).

The Taliban also banned girls from secondary education (Bloch, 2022). After attracting a series of furious repercussions, the IEA declared that it would open the schools for girls (Stancatti, 2022).

Shortly after the declaration, as young girls were waiting for the reopening of their schools, IEA officials reversed their promise, stating that they needed a more comprehensive plan for this (Padshah & Goldbaum, 2022). Although some female activists established secret schools and libraries for girls and women (Suwanrumpha, 2022), the devastating effect of the Taliban’s backtrack on school reopening for girls could not be altered, and a considerably large percentage of women and girls are currently deprived of primary education in Afghanistan. It is important to note that being deprived of secondary education directly makes young girls ineligible for the university entrance exam (Konkur), thereby imposing an even more drastic effect on their educational and professional life.

In addition, the IEA declared that all girls attending colleges and universities must wear a completely black covering (abaya). Otherwise, they would not be allowed to attend classes and take exams (Mukhtar, 2022). A series of videos went viral showing Taliban officers sending girls home after halting them at the Kabul Polytechnic University gate because their hijabs were not black (Mukhtar, 2022). This instance shows how the Taliban are gradually stepping back to the rules and regulations they relied upon during their previous reign.

The Taliban also went one step further in limiting girls and women in Afghanistan by banning them from travelling domestically and internationally without a male guardian (Reuters, 2022). They had also previously restricted girls in terms of furthering their education abroad by stating that women going overseas to study should have a male relative accompany them. There are recent instances in which some women with tickets have been turned away at Kabul airport (Reuters, 2022).

The unexpected fall of Kabul and such consequences urged Afghan women to start resisting against the regime which had previously deprived their mothers and grandmothers of their very basic rights. In January 2022, representatives of Afghan women’s rights met with a team from the Islamic Emirate in Oslo, calling for the reopening of girls’ schools and the inclusion of women in the administration (TOLOnews, 2022). Women and girls also took to streets to object to the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan and the limitations they have imposed on them (Bloch, 2022). In reaction, the IEA employed violence, including whipping women, slapping them with batons, pointing guns and firing weapons into the air (Bloch, 2022). Furthermore, the Taliban have been kidnapping women’s rights activists since January 2022, and their locations have been unknown. A group of armed men kidnapped women human rights campaigners Tamana Zaryab Paryani and Parwana Ibrahimkhel from their homes in Kabul on 29 January 2022. Even in the face of harsh repression of dissent and action, Paryani and Ibrahimkhel had been working for women’s rights in Afghanistan. They took part in a rally near Kabul University on 16 January 2022, just days before they were kidnapped, demanding women’s rights to labour, education and independence. Nevertheless, this has not been the last case of women abduction by the IEA. The Taliban continue to kidnap women who organise or even participate in protests, calling for their basic rights.

However, the rights that such activists are calling for these are not only the demands of Afghan women. Women of different ages and professions across different provinces of Afghanistan believe that the Taliban must recognise a wide spectrum of their rights ranging from the rights to health, education and movement to their freedom of performing arts, participating in the Afghan politics and performing other social activities. According to the author’s survey, women believe that let alone primary education, high school and bachelor degrees also cannot and will not be their last step of education and they desired to further their academic progress to master’s and PhD levels. With regard to the question of ‘Will the secondary education be enough for Afghan women as a basic right in the post-2021 context?’ 189 out of 200 respondents (96.9%) answered ‘No’, while only 5% of them answered in the affirmative. About 71.1% of the respondents believed that inclusion in the cabinet, candidacy for elections, inclusion in the country’s politics and doing social activities were (in nature) among women’s basic rights, while 28.9% of them disregarded this statement. About 93.4% of the respondents agreed that only the primary and basic rights granted to women in the first period of the Taliban’s rule such as being homeschooled and working in all-female environments were not enough for the post-2021 Afghan women, whereas nearly 8% of them believed the opposite. About 77.9% of the respondents believed that forming assemblies, appearing on the television, doing sports, and performing music and arts were (in nature) part of women’s basic rights, while 22.1% did not agree with this statement. These results chart how, while the Taliban’s ideology has remained the same despite the passage of time, women’s ideas have considerably changed since the first rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This shift is, though, not only caused by the passage of time and generational cleavage. The scholarship on human rights’ dynamism needs to also recognise other external factors, that is, international intervention and intervention by another society, that instigate the micro-level evolution of human rights within a society. Against this backdrop, Afghanistan’s experience with the Taliban regimes and women’s rights constitutes a proper and timely case study to this phenomenon.

Exploring the Middle Ground: How Should the IEA Collaborate with the International Community?

The modern conception of human rights offered by the UDHR developed as a response to the cruelties and massacre of the Second World War. It is a result of modernity’s cultural endeavour and the result of creating the principle of subjectivity, challenging a men-centred and upholding the legal underpinnings that go hand in hand with modernity (Tibi, 1994). Nevertheless, this notion is marred by cultural errors, due to its indifference to the diversity of cultures and societies (Tibi, 1994). First, this modern conception of human rights cannot be immediately and uniformly imposed on all kinds of societies, whether these societies have already completed their path to modernisation, industrialisation and enlightenment or not. Second, even if this notion is imposed uniformly on all kinds of societies, not all of them will experience the same pattern of human rights’ evolution and development. Such patterns will always be affected by cultural and contextual sensitivities as well as external factors. For example, before the Taliban’s first rule in Afghanistan, the society had not even realised the need for protection of women against violence. Following this period, in 2001, the UN-led interim government of Afghanistan adopted the EVAW law which officially recognised such a right for Afghan women. This is so, while some other societies including the USA, the UK and Canada adopted these laws earlier, enabled by different factors and circumstances. The UK adopted the Domestic Violence Law in 1976, the USA adopted the Violence against Women Act in 1994 and Canada adopted the Domestic Violence Protection Act in 2000 (De Silva De Alwis & Klugman, 2015). In the case of Afghanistan, sensing the need for such a law and the recognition of such a right for women was a partly international process, while the USA, the UK and Canada realised the need for such laws on their own. This is how societies develop different variants of rights within peculiar and contextually sensitive procedures.

On the other hand, postmodern idea of human rights (Rawlsian theory) makes human rights more familiar to many cultures and people. Rawls’s definition of human rights is more open to diversity than that of the UDHR (Tibi, 1994). This is not, though, to imply that Rawls’s interpretation of human rights is without flaws. As previously stated, the postmodern conception of human rights fails to account for micro-level variances in human rights. While reaffirming Rawlsian theory, this study contributes to it by providing new insights and attempting to find a medium ground between modern and postmodern human rights ideals. This middle ground affirms that human rights are universal and must be recognised for all human beings without discrimination. However, human rights are at the same time subject to evolution and development in response to every society’s particular circumstances. Not only this, but they also vary from time to time within a single society, and this variation is enabled by different external factors, as charted in the case of Afghanistan.

So how should human rights be recognised and implemented within the framework of this middle ground? And accordingly, how can the IEA cooperate with the international community to implement Afghan women’s rights in the post-2021 context?

Conclusion

There are two leading theories about the nature of human rights. The UDHR favours a universal understanding, while Rawls offers a more contextually sensitive image of human rights. However, Rawlsian theory is preoccupied with the variation of human rights across the contexts of different societies. This is so, while the case study of Afghan women’s rights during the Taliban regimes reveals a local-scale pattern of human rights variation within the same society. This evidence adds a new angle to the postmodern notion of human rights which is offered by Rawls. At the same time, it creates a middle ground where the IEA and the international community can work together to implement women’s rights in Afghanistan.