Misogyny in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan: the changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence

Abstract

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.     

Preface to Yoshimi Shun'ya's Voice Capitalism

Abstract

This article is a translation of the preface to Voice Capitalism by influential sociologist Yoshimi Shun'ya. The chapter ties together a wealth of discourse on the meaning of sound to society and to the individual, and its evolving role as a means of expression and connection to our environments. Yoshimi walks us through Nagai Kafū's reverence for tangible sound, R. Murray Schafer's schizophonic soundscapes, Marshal McLuhan's essays on the impact of the advent of sound recordings and electronic voices, Glenn Gould's theories on the blurring borders between musical performer and audience – amongst numerous other topics and writers.     

The problem of peace and the meaning of ‘post-war’

The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not be understood as a temporal breakpoint: a definitive after. Rather, it signals an ambition to address and move beyond, analogous to the term post-colonialism. I subsequently draw on the post-colonial literature to further elaborate my conceptualisation of post-war transition with three propositions, respectively concerning: the discursive politics of retrospectivity; the assertion of sovereignty as the foundational referent of law and political order; and the concept of articulation to juxtapose contingent change and constrained agency. I then apply these ideas to the Sri Lankan case to illustrate what angles and insights my conceptualisation of post-war transition could offer.     

Aid and transition from a war economy to an oligarchy in post-war Tajikistan

Exclusion and violence persist in post-conflict states, despite international assistance aimed at the demilitarization of politics. Through a field-based study of Tajikistan, this paper argues that aid focuses on economic liberalization, not the implementation of peace agreements, in the initial stage of post-war transition. Such an organization of aid empowers a particular group of elites who have privileged access to state assets at the time of civil war settlement, allowing them to establish institutional frameworks that will consolidate their personal and monopolistic control of resources. This leads to the collapse of power-sharing arrangements, as the incumbent regime seeks to remove wartime commanders and opposition leaders from the administrative apparatus. In Tajikistan, the incumbent regime has also prosecuted many of these former allies and opponents on account of corruption through state agencies established with donor assistance. Aid thus institutionalized exclusion and sustains patterns of violence along civil war divisions, rather than transforming wartime power structures.     

Experience Writing on World War II in Post-war Japanese Literature

In early postwar Japanese literature emerged a large number of literary works on the experience of World War II. All these works interpret the writers’ intuitive sense from the perspective of battlefield experience, captive experience, atomic bomb blast experience, post-war experience and the occupied experience. Although they had the same topic, different literature schools and different individual authors wrote in quite different ways, whose views on the war were totally diverse. Among all these writers, some reflected on the duty of war with consciences; the others attempted to obscure the guilty in their works. Thus it is necessary to make concrete analyses on concrete conditions when the literary criticism is being studied, which is not only the expression of respecting historical truth, but also the objective requirement of maintaining the victory of the war against Fascism.     

福利社会与发展中的斯堪的纳维亚福利国家

欧洲各国致力于福利国家的建设已逾百年,经历了两次世界大战.各国在社会投入水平和福利机构方面的巨大差异至今仍在,但是各国对于福利社会的可持续性的认可和公众对福利社会的高度承诺则是基本一致的.各福利社会有来自各方面的维系:中央政府或地方政府、公司企业、家庭和自发组织的机构.不同的福利社会体系与它们之间的关系长期以来对欧洲各福利国家有着不同的意义,形成了具有不同特点的福利制度.在20世纪最后十年里重建福利国家的痛苦过程中,经济增长和社会发展之间的关系一直是整个斯堪的纳维亚地区社会问题的争论热点.然而到目前为止,效率与平等之间的冲突大多得到了解决,在北欧五国都保持了福利政策的稳定.该地区独特的历史经验并不排斥发展中国家的政府和机构为了发展福利事业而积极推行普及政策所做出的努力.     

19世纪马来半岛的社会环境与华人秘密结社

19世纪马来半岛是一个典型的移民社会,人口增长飞快,男女比例严重失调,社会关系极不稳定,政治统治力量薄弱,社会冲突频繁不已。移民社会关系的重组和脆弱,以及社会的暴力化倾向,为超自然关系的、并带有武装暴力色彩的华人秘密结社提供了广阔的成长环境。     

社会团体的培育管理与和谐社区建设

改革开放以来,尤其是建立市场经济体制之后,我国的社会团体呈现出强劲的发展势头,数量急剧增加,涉及社会生活的各个方面。但是相对滞后的管理方式,制约了社会团体的进一步发展,必须加以改革。本文阐述了加强社会团体管理的紧迫性,探讨了社区民间社团在社区建设中的作用,并提出了加强社会团体培育和管理的思路。     

Secrets,strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone

This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figures. Poro membership is essential to the production of social and physical boundaries between insiders and outsiders of a community. By conditioning access to local positions of power and decision-making about how resources are to be distributed, the Poro also conditions access to security and justice. The networked quality of order-making becomes particularly noticeable when the police engages in Poro affairs, which accentuates the multitude of registers of authorities that are combined and assembled as the Poro and the police interact.     

战后国民政府的外汇政策与侨汇

战后,国民政府为吸收侨汇曾几度调整外汇政策,然而,由于恶性通货膨胀加剧,财政经济濒临崩溃,国民政府无法维持一个稳定、合理的外汇汇率,对汇率的调整往往只有暂时的效果,当官价汇率与市场汇率接近时,侨汇数量就增加,反之则减少。战后侨汇呈逐年递减之势,由于官价汇率与市场汇率往往背离,因而无法阻止侨汇大量流入黑市。