In August 2021, the Taliban returned to energy in Afghanistan. This adopted 20 years of US-led army intervention and occupation, repeatedly justified as a mission to liberate Afghan ladies from the Taliban throughout their first regime from 1996-2001. Since their return, the Taliban have enforced an institutionalised regime of systemic discrimination and exclusion of ladies, depriving them of elementary rights and freedoms.
This degree of repression has triggered widespread concern and worldwide mobilisation. Feminist advocates, authorized students, and worldwide establishments have intensified requires authorized accountability, mobilising the arsenal of obtainable authorized instruments to carry an finish to gender-based oppression in Afghanistan.
In September 2024, 4 applicant nations, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, introduced their intention to pursue authorized proceedings towards Afghanistan earlier than the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice for violations of the Conference on the Elimination of all Types of Discrimination towards Ladies, the primary case of its variety. In July 2025, the Worldwide Prison Courtroom issued arrest warrants for 2 of the Taliban’s leaders, stating that there are ‘affordable grounds’ to imagine that, since seizing energy in 2021, they’d dedicated the crime of gender persecution, against the law towards humanity beneath Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute.
Alongside these measures, probably the most distinguished and sustained response has been the revival of the marketing campaign to Finish Gender Apartheid, first launched by the Feminist Majority Basis in 1997 in response to the Taliban’s discriminatory insurance policies towards ladies. Central to the present marketing campaign are proposals to legally recognise ‘gender apartheid’ as a definite worldwide crime.
The idea of gender apartheid has gained growing traction, with the UN Particular Rapporteur for Afghanistan describing it as an rising authorized class in 2024. This momentum has carried into debates on the draft Crimes towards Humanity Conference, the place there may be now a concerted push to incorporate gender apartheid forward of intergovernmental negotiations scheduled for 2026.
Regardless of this momentum, proposals for authorized recognition have obtained little vital scrutiny. That is significantly troubling given the historical past of worldwide interventions in Afghanistan, the place feminist goals have beforehand been co-opted to legitimise imperial and militarised agendas which have disproportionately harmed ladies. Whereas naming systemic gender oppression is important, casting criminalisation as the first response could not solely show ineffective—it could additionally reinstate colonial logics which have lengthy narrowed feminist horizons of emancipation. In doing so, it dangers leaving intact, and even exacerbating, the structural situations shaping Afghan ladies’s lives after a long time of battle, occupation, and neoliberal reconstruction.
Trigger for warning
The authorized recognition of gender apartheid is claimed to fill a significant hole in worldwide legislation. Present authorized instruments, whether or not beneath worldwide human rights legislation or worldwide prison legislation, are offered as insufficient to seize a regime that institutes structural gender discrimination as its mode of governance. The time period ‘apartheid’, it’s additional argued, carries distinctive normative pressure, drawing on the historic stigma of the worldwide battle towards racial apartheid in Southern Africa. On this view, authorized recognition would, due to this fact, shut a authorized hole, strengthen accountability, and mobilise worldwide strain.
On the core of the proposals lies the ‘substitution argument’, which holds that the worldwide authorized framework developed to handle racial apartheid must be tailored to confront systemic gender-based domination. Amongst others, Karima Bennoune, a authorized scholar and distinguished voice within the push for authorized recognition, argues that the absence of a comparable authorized class for gender displays a troubling asymmetry in worldwide legislation’s therapy of gender- and race-based discrimination. On this foundation, the proposed authorized definition is modelled immediately on the crime of apartheid in Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, with gender changing race.
The substitution argument, whereas initially persuasive in its simplicity, provides rise to 2 interrelated considerations that warrant cautious consideration. First, it rests on an already diluted conception of apartheid that’s indifferent from its anti-colonial family tree. Second, by changing race with gender inside this framework, it treats each as interchangeable id classes fairly than as traditionally produced buildings of domination, thereby diluting their which means and emancipatory potential.
Taken collectively, these strikes danger producing a narrowed and racialised account of gender oppression that centres ‘ladies and ladies’ as paradigmatic victims, casts Muslim males as major perpetrators, and mobilises acquainted post-9/11 narratives wherein gender-based violence turns into legible as a justification for worldwide intervention. This danger is particularly salient given the contexts wherein the idea is claimed to almost definitely apply, notably Afghanistan and Iran.
Dilution and the lack of apartheid’s anti-colonial which means
The place to begin for proposals to legally recognise gender apartheid is the prohibition of racial apartheid, which is repeatedly invoked as each ethical precedent and juridical template. Nonetheless, this transfer obscures the anti-colonial family tree of apartheid’s prohibition. Apartheid didn’t emerge as an summary concern with systemic discrimination, nor as a impartial descriptor of unequal therapy between teams. It was articulated by anti-colonial struggles that understood apartheid as a type of racialised settler domination, inseparable from conquest, dispossession, labour exploitation, and the denial of self-determination.
Inside worldwide authorized discourse, this family tree was progressively eroded. As debates over apartheid unfolded on the UN, representatives from the World South sought to situate apartheid alongside colonialism and world white supremacy, whereas Western states labored to cultivate the idea by reframing it as an issue of inner discrimination remediable by formal equality and authorized prohibition. Its eventual codification within the Rome Statute consolidated this shift, framing apartheid as an inhumane act inside the crimes towards humanity framework and narrowing its which means to types of institutionalised home discrimination, whereas backgrounding the political economic system of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that sustained it. Though wider interpretations could also be attainable, inside this framework, the danger is that apartheid turns into one thing that may be condemned and prosecuted with none crucial engagement with the worldwide energy relations by which domination is produced and maintained.
Proposals to codify gender apartheid construct upon this already diluted understanding. They depend on an abstraction of apartheid that treats it as a versatile authorized mannequin for naming institutionalised discrimination, removable from the historic struggles by which it was cast. The enchantment to apartheid’s ethical gravitas due to this fact relies upon upon, and concurrently obscures, the prior neutralisation of its anti-colonial content material.
Substitution and the abstraction of race and gender
It’s this dilution that undergirds the substitution argument. As soon as apartheid is known primarily because the institutionalised domination of 1 group over one other, outlined by reference to a protected attribute, it seems believable to switch race with gender and to deal with the 2 as commensurable inside the identical authorized framework. Nonetheless, this transfer rests on a slender and depoliticised understanding not solely of apartheid, but in addition of race, that has lengthy been criticised inside authorized scholarship.
Worldwide legislation has tended to deal with race as a secure id class fairly than as a traditionally contingent relation of domination produced by slavery, colonialism, and capitalist accumulation. In doing so, it usually depends on biologised or reified notions of group distinction that mirror the classificatory logics of the very regimes it seeks to sentence. When race is approached on this manner, its substitution with gender seems simple, since each are lowered to markers of group id that may be focused by discriminatory legal guidelines or insurance policies.
What’s misplaced on this course of is an account of how each race and gender themselves intersect and function as mutually reinforcing hierarchies. It additionally obscures how each are constituted by materials relations and political tasks wherein worldwide legislation itself is implicated. Substitution due to this fact doesn’t merely prolong the attain of worldwide legislation’s protections. It reproduces the identical abstraction that has already narrowed the idea of apartheid, translating it into the register of gender with out interrogating the structural situations—largely triggered or worsened by the US occupation of Afghanistan—that produce gendered domination.
Narrowing gender and reproducing salvationist logics
The consequences of dilution and substitution turn into significantly clear within the conception of gender that emerges from the proposals. Though advocates usually acknowledge that gender is socially constructed and context-dependent, the operational framing of gender apartheid stays overwhelmingly organised across the experiences of ladies and ladies, with males persistently positioned as perpetrators. Gender thus capabilities much less as a relational construction of energy than as a proxy for womanhood related to victimhood, anchored in a binary that renders sure topics seen whereas marginalising others.
This narrowing has a number of penalties. It dangers flattening the variety of Afghan ladies’s lives and types of resistance, collapsing them right into a singular determine of vulnerability that’s legible to worldwide establishments however disconnected from the heterogeneity of lived expertise. It additionally sidelines non-binary, queer, and different gendered subjectivities that don’t match neatly inside the woman-man binary, regardless of the marketing campaign’s rhetorical commitments to inclusivity. On the identical time, it privileges a specific imaginative and prescient of gender justice grounded in liberal rights, particular person autonomy, and market participation, treating these as common benchmarks of emancipation whereas marginalising different feminist imaginaries rooted in collective modes of dwelling, non secular ethics, or socio-economic redistribution.
Taken collectively, these dynamics reproduce a well-known salvationist logic wherein worldwide legislation is positioned as the first agent of liberation, Afghan ladies are forged as perpetual victims in want of rescue, and Muslim males are constructed as the harmful perpetrators of hurt. Inside this framing, gender oppression is narrowed and refracted by gendered and racialised assumptions, whereas the structural and transnational situations shaping ladies’s lives, together with militarisation, financial devastation, and geopolitical intervention, recede from view. Concern for girls is repeatedly mobilised by post-9/11 narratives wherein gender-based violence is securitised, rendering ladies’s struggling legible as a justification for worldwide intervention whereas obscuring each Western complicity and violence. Because of this, an idea initially cast to call and dismantle white supremacy dangers being redeployed in ways in which reproduce hierarchies of race and gender, fairly than dismantling them.
It’s inside this broader context that the present marketing campaign to recognise gender apartheid should be located. Whereas it marks a departure from earlier iterations by presenting itself as Afghan-led and privileging authorized over armed intervention, its most influential voices stay elite actors intently related to worldwide establishments and their governing logics. On this setting, appeals to ‘native management’ danger functioning much less as a substantive redistribution of epistemic authority than as a legitimating body by which the priorities of worldwide liberal legalism are superior, narrowing the vary of Afghan ladies’s views and feminist responses to those who stay legible inside institutional frameworks.
Towards a extra emancipatory feminist response
By diluting apartheid’s which means, enabling substitution, and foreclosing extra expansive accounts of gender and justice, proposals to recognise gender apartheid danger narrowing feminist politics at exactly the second when a extra structurally attentive response is most urgently required. As authorized recognition quickly good points institutional momentum, feminist engagement can not deal with criminalisation as self-evident or enough.
If feminist solidarity with Afghan ladies is to be significant, it should transfer past juridical enlargement to confront the structural, geopolitical, and political-economic situations that form gendered domination, together with the longer legacies of Western imperialism that contributed to the situations beneath which the Taliban re-emerged. It should additionally interact critically with feminist epistemologies and justice frameworks past liberal legalism, together with Islamic feminist approaches that foreground collective company and are rooted in additional regionally grounded knowledges and visions of justice.
Proposals to criminalise gender apartheid ought to, due to this fact, be approached with warning. Relatively than increasing {the catalogue} of crimes whereas leaving underlying relations of domination intact, feminist engagement with worldwide legislation ought to prioritise approaches that stay attentive to the analytical and political results of substitution, acknowledge historic accountability, and keep accountable to the anti-colonial struggles from which the language of apartheid itself emerged.
