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This thesis examines contestations over gender violence as points of entry into an analysis of
gender, politics and sovereign power in contemporary Afghanistan. It explores the evolving
parameters of what ‘counts’ as violence against women in Afghanistan, articulated in legal
frameworks and practices, in public and media debates and in the interventions of political
leaders, diplomats and aid workers. The thesis asks whether violence against women has
become a governance issue in Afghanistan and what this means for the position of women and
for broader relations of power. These questions are investigated through an examination of the
origins and fate of a new law on violence against women, a series of controversies over
women’s shelters, attempts to bestow recognition on informal justice processes and the
trajectories of individual episodes of violence as they travelled through different and
sometimes competing legal forums. I show how the outcome of these struggles have the
potential to redraw boundaries between government and family domains, and to subordinate
women to kinship power, or alternatively, constitute them as independent legal persons.
The thesis further analyses negotiations over and interventions into violence against women
as revealing of shifting domains and claims of sovereignty, of projects of power and of
political technologies. The processes detailed in the thesis illuminate a landscape of plural and
competing legal regimes that in specific times and places presided over individual episodes of
gender violence The thesis also shows that far from operating as a singular bloc, Western
forays in Afghanistan produced multiple and contradictory effects on women’s security and
protection.
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