A Transnational Feminist Perspective on the US-NATO Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan: In Conversation with Malalai Joya

A conversation between a feminist scholar and a women’s right activist on the US-NATO military withdrawal from Afghanistan (August 2021), this piece aims to share an alternative strand of Afghan feminist thought to the dominant gender apartheid rhetoric presented in popular Euromerican media. From a transnational feminist lens, the article offers Afghan feminist strategies for survival in the face of war, terrorism, imperialism, and misogyny. In this conversation, the parliamentar-ian Malalai Joya recounts the political stakes involved in her fight for justice, her resistance to imperial feminism, and thoughtful critique of some Afghan women leaders, conservative or liberal, who maintain patriarchal power but fail to wield their privileged positionalities to foreground the economic and social needs of the vast majority of Afghan women. The conversation steers toward questions about whether Joya’s socialist dream of achieving freedom and democracy in Afghanistan is too idealistic, or potentially feasible through her theory of democratization of knowledge as resistance to oppression. Given the geopolitical power dynamic between the two speakers, from a critical transnational feminist lens, this conversation seeks to shift epistemology from the colonial model of knowledge extraction to a more collaborative practice of decolonization of feminist knowledge formation.