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Gender |
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Gender - particularly the
position of women - has been a disputed area of programming in the
political and aid spheres in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s.
Gender-related research has often focused solely on Afghan women, with
little effort to explore complex gender relations and perspectives in the
country, and how these differ according to ethnicity, socio-economic
standing, marital status, age and household history, including experiences
as refugees. With the onset of Taliban rule, the situation of Afghan women
became a more prominent issue, but this interest appears to have waned
with the change in government and there is yet to be much nuanced,
in-depth research on gender issues in the Afghanistan of today.
AREU believes that developing a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the position of Afghan women and gender relations in general is likely to challenge stereotypes and better inform policy and programming. To address this, AREU conducts both specific gender-related research and incorporate gender aspects into other research in order to improve the development of gender sensitive polices and programmes to ensure all Afghans - both men and women - benefit. The current gender research
programme examines the policy implications of gender relations in the
Afghan context.Two new studies will take place in 2006-07. One is a study
on family dynamics and family violencewhich aims to understand how the
family has changed ver the past 20 or so years of conflict, how
thesechanges influence relationships and power balance in the family and
under what circumstances they lead to more or less violence within the
home. Such violenceincludes that between males and females, as well as
female-female and male-male violence and issues ofchild discipline. The
results will provide an in-depth understandingof attitudes toward family
violence in Afghanistan, which may inform actions and messagesaimed at
reducing the incidence of such violence.The second study will investigate
the functioning of community-based justice systems in Afghanistan. Itsaims
are: 1) to understand how community based justice systems operate,
describing their variability across time and space, and investigating the
principles underlyingtheir decisions; 2) to investigate the links
between
shari’a law, state law and customary law and to discover which disputes are resolved at the local level and whichget referred to state institutions and why; and 3) to understand how the functioning and outcomes of community-based justice systems may impact equity, particularly gender equity. This study will begin by September2006 and field work will be done in two to four provinces. |
PUBLICATIONS ON GENDER