Feminist Revolutionary Advocacy in the Afghanistan Conflict Context : A Qualitative Content Analysis of a Political Feminist Organization RAWA’s Documents and Statements

Sammanfattning: This study explores how feminism and women’s rights as concepts can look in Afghanistan and how a political organization RAWA interprets them. This study focuses on specific armed conflict contexts in Afghanistan, and it was chosen because women’s rights have been violated by many actors in the conflicts. I aim to study what kind of factors influence RAWA's interpretation with the use of qualitative content analysis as a research method. Post-colonial feminist theory was chosen to help understand and contextualize RAWA’s status as an Afghan Women's organization and rhetoric. Material includes RAWA's documents from its official website where it has published feminist political statements on different subjects. The post-colonial feminist concept of “Third World" woman works as a theoretical frame of this study. This theoretical standpoint of post-colonial feminism was chosen to help analyze the main research question of how RAWA interprets feminism. Mainstream feminism is still primarily understood from the Western liberal feminist point of view, focusing on a broad sense of gender equality, suffrage rights in a democratic system, and fighting the patriarchy (e.g. man’s supremacy). Though, liberal feminism is criticized for forgetting women's experiences outside the West. Thus, post-colonial feminism has had the important duty of relieving of experiences of “Third World” women and staying as a critical voice against liberal feminism. Hence, we need multiple feminist concepts and theories to reveal different human experiences to gain equality and understand different forms of oppression. This thesis' main academic interest is to research how feminism can differ from time and place. Hence, the paper then examines hegemonic power dynamics inside feminism and analyses how women in old colonies could determine their versions of feminism.