A Walk on the Wild Side of Gender, War and Development in Afghanistan and Northern Uganda

Citation:

Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 2015. "A Walk on the Wild Side of Gender, War and Development in Afghanistan and Northern Uganda." In Development in Crisis: Threats to Human Well-Being in the Global South and Global North, edited by Rae Lesser Blumberg and Samuel Cohn, 134-55. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. 

Author: Rae Lesser Blumberg

Abstract:

The 'walk on the wild side' took place in Afghanistan where women have almost zero economic power and their overall position is arguably about the most unequal on earth. There were few gender angles, although the government's participatory process to formulate the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) was the first time in the country's history that people from all 34 provinces had been consulted on their country's development and future. Ahmed-Ghosh provides the first key to Afghanistan's history: this has been a tribal society, multilingual and multiethnic, never fully governed by a weak state. The main sticking point is men's unwillingness to give land, the main source of wealth in a farming society, to women. This chapter explains two gender theories and applies them to Afghan and Acholi women. Acholi women have no effective land rights because the group is patrilineal with male inheritance of land.

Topics: Development, Economies, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Governance, Livelihoods, Rights, Land Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan

Year: 2015