Veiled Voices, Shrouded Lives: Necropolitics and the Struggles of Afghan Women under Taliban Rule

Angela Bell

Since the Taliban retook control in 2021, women and girls in Afghanistan have lost both their hard-won rights, and their hopes and aspirations for the future. This thesis examines how the Taliban 2.0 regime has systematically rolled back the basic rights of women, excluded and erased them from public life, isolated them, and made everyday survival precarious. It argues that the actions by the Taliban regime in relation to women represent an example of what Achille Mbembe theorises as “necropolitics”. Necropolitics refers to the use of political power to control “disposable” regime subjects through pervasive threats of violence and death (Mbembe 2003). Necropolitics, according to Mbembe, culminates in the creation of “death-worlds”, where the people considered disposable–in this case Afghan women–effectively become the “living dead” (Mbembe 2019, 91). The living dead occupy a space between life and death–stripped of agency and autonomy over their own bodies, refused basic political and civil rights, made socially estranged or isolated, and prevented from determining their own life and future (Mbembe 2019). Extending Mbembe’s work, Lauren Berlant’s (2007) theory of “slow death” is then applied to explain the everyday forms of structural attrition which underlie the creation of the death-world of Afghan women. While Mbembe focuses on more performative forms of violence (such as war and occupation), Berlant’s slow death framework examines how measures such as restricting freedom of movement, removing access to education, and precluding wage earning, also produce a terrorised and oppressed living dead. Finally, it is argued that the slow death prescribed to Afghan women is in many ways as destructive as the more direct forms of violence.

Veiled Voices, Shrouded Lives: Necropolitics and the Struggles of Afghan Women under Taliban Rule

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