Conscientization and Resistance: Afghan Women’s Struggle for Agency Under Taliban Hegemony (1996-2025)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the social history of Afghan women (1996–2025) as a non-deterministic process of consciousness transformation amid ideological repression and successive regime change. Countering global narratives that reduce Afghan women to passive victims of religious patriarchy, the study addresses a critical gap: the absence of a systematic, historically grounded model linking private spiritual motivation to public political resistance across generations. Employing a qualitative-historical, narrative-feminist, and hermeneutic approach, it analyzes corpus of documents including oral testimonies, institutional human rights reports, and international media archives subjected to rigorous external and internal source criticism, and interpreted through collective memory (Halbwachs), critical pedagogy (Freire), and social movement (Khan and Sharp). Findings show that systemic repression does not mechanically extinguish female agency; rather, under specific socio-spiritual conditions, it can serve as a trigger activating three chronological phases: survival consciousness (1996–2001), sustained through clandestine home-based schools framed as religious obligation; reflective consciousness (2001–2021), articulated through formal education and civic organization; and critical consciousness or conscientização (2021–2025), mobilized through encrypted digital networks and transnational diaspora solidarity against renewed educational bans. The study's novelty lies in specifying concrete mediating mechanisms, clandestine education, intergenerational memory transmission, grassroots social organization, and transnational digital networks through which collective trauma is progressively transformed into emancipatory social and spiritual agency.