Afghan Women Activist Stories: Part II: Courage and Resistance – Voices from Afghanistan

Abstract

Focusing on lived experience under Taliban rule, this section of the IQAS special issue presents first-person activist narratives by Afghan women who continue to live and work inside Afghanistan. Based on sustained engagement and repeated field visits since 2024, the section brings together accounts by women involved in development, humanitarian, and community initiatives, offering grounded insights into how they navigate intensifying restrictions in their everyday lives. Emerging from a series of face-to-face and online conversations, these contributions were authored in Dari or English and edited with close attention to preserving each author’s voice. The narratives foreground forms of agency that persist in highly constrained settings. They highlight the importance of family support, horizontal women’s networks, and male allyship in sustaining women’s educational and professional trajectories, as well as the ethical, emotional, and relational labour required to continue working under conditions of gendered repression. Taken together, these accounts challenge representations that cast Afghan women solely as victims. Instead, they document how a new generation of women activists continues to think, strategise, and act within the limits imposed upon them, sustaining hopes and ambitions that extend beyond their own lives and offering a powerful testament to courage, endurance, and collective possibility.