The Taliban rule is characterized by scholars and policy analysts in different terms, ranging from systematic discrimination and oppression, to ethnic cleansing, gender apartheid, and Islamic totalitarianism. While all of these characterizations are valid, none alone captures the total essence of the regime. The Taliban rule, an exclusive male cleric regime, includes episodes of ethnic cleansing, gender apartheid, massive violation of fundamental rights, forced disappearances, forced displacements, war crimes against armed resistance, and Islamic totalitarianism.
I argue that Taliban Afghanistan represents a unique form of governmentality and disciplinary power that requires new conceptual language to describe it: a religiously constituted ghetto with tribal characteristics, combined with a gender apartheid segregated society. This dual framework better captures how the Taliban has created both spatial containment of the entire population within a tribalized, religiously defined boundary, and systematic internal segregation based on gender, ethnicity, and religious interpretation. Only by developing precise terminology that makes visible what has been hidden can we develop appropriate international legal and political responses such as justice, reparation, and redress.
The Taliban regime manifests elements of both the Jewish ghettos created by Nazi Germany and the segregated society of South Africa apartheid. Both concepts have archetype cases recognizing a particular type of crime against humanity. Ethnic cleansing was used to describe the atrocities in Yugoslavia, while the genocide archetype connected to the Jewish Holocaust. Meanwhile, apartheid referred to South African segregation. It is inaccurate to draw an analogy from each of these concepts to characterize the Taliban atrocities; however, there is a need to develop a distinct conceptual category to capture the pain and suffering under the Taliban regime. The political science lexicon falls short of a terminology to account for the totality of the wide range of oppression that the Taliban regime manifests.
The Taliban’s hierarchical ghetto
The Taliban’s gender apartheid regime has been called an “open-air prison” for women by critics. However, the metaphor of an “open-air prison” does not accurately reflect the situation in Afghanistan. Drawing on comparisons to Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Afghanistan can similarly be viewed as a ghetto under the Taliban’s occupation and control – a regime that has not been recognized by other states in the international community, whose women are deprived of fundamental human rights and governed by a group seemingly indifferent to the welfare and rights of its people.
In the Jewish ghetto, a Jew was not allowed to travel or work outside a ghetto unless they were considered an essential worker for the Nazis. Oskar Schindler, a Nazi German industrialist, saved more than 11,000 Jews in his factory by hiring them from the ghetto as essential workers for the munitions factory.
In the Taliban-imposed hierarchical ghetto, people are stratified based on gender, ethnicity, tribe, and religious beliefs. This creates several distinct layers of compounded oppression. Of all forms of oppression under the Taliban, the most severe is reserved for two groups – women and non-believers. However, the depth of women’s oppression is further intensified by intersecting identities—ethno-linguistic minority women and women who hold different interpretations of Islam than those of the Taliban face even more restrictive measures and heightened vulnerabilities.
Women are not allowed to leave their houses unless they are accompanied by a male. They are not allowed to work unless they are considered essential workers, leaving them only with limited and specific sectors such as health and primary education. Similar to Oskar Schindler, some NGOs in Taliban Afghanistan are able to hire a few women as essential employees or engage them in basic livelihood projects.
While Nazi Germany demonized the Jews as a threat to the Aryan race and the Reich, women in Taliban Afghanistan are considered a source of moral corruption and impurity.
An apartheid based on gender segregation
The Taliban regime is also characterized as a gender apartheid regime by several women resisters in Afghanistan and Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan. This characterization is based on a race-sex analogy depicting the situation as one in which women are denied their human dignity—the foundation of human rights—and also segregated.
While racial segregation in South Africa divided the public sphere between Whites and Blacks, the gender segregation under the Taliban regime contains women within the private sphere, leaving the public sphere to men.
Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of the African National Congress, described apartheid’s impact in terms that parallel Afghanistan’s situation:
I would like to tell you what Apartheid really means to us. It means that instead of our children being educated, they are indoctrinated. It means that our men cannot move from country to town and from one part of town to another without a Pass. Now our women too will be unable to leave their houses without a Pass. It means that 70 per cent of my people live below the breadline. It means that in my own province of Natal, 85 per cent of our children are suffering from malnutrition. Believe it or not, it means that by law our people cannot aspire to do any work other than ordinary manual labour. It means massive unemployment. What Apartheid means is a long tale of suffering. In a word, it means the denial of dignity and of ordinary human rights.
Like apartheid South Africa, the Taliban system is established, maintained, and developed through legal mechanisms enforced by the state. For instance, the Popular Registration Act (1950) classified all South Africans in three categories: Blacks, Coloreds (those of mixed race), and Whites; the Group Areas Act (1950); the Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951); and the Natives Resettlement Act (1956) further reinforced segregation. The Taliban codify Sharia law to create a gender-segregated society based on religious and tribal morality. Apart from the notorious “Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue” law, hundreds of other gender-based persecutions are enforced through decrees, many of which are documented by the Afghanistan Justice Archive .
Both African racial apartheid and the Taliban gender apartheid are justified based on a selective reading of religion. In South Africa, the biblical concepts of “curse of Ham” and “chosen people,” initially conceptualized by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1825, were weaponized for the justification of apartheid. In the case of the Taliban, the role of religion is more intense; Deobandi Islam presents the sole ideological foundation of the Taliban regime, not merely one instrument among many.
The need for a new lexicon
As the saying goes, “change a word, change the world.” Characterizing the crime of the Taliban in proper terms would have direct ramification for the accountability mechanism. For instance, using the term gender instead of sex in the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute opened the door for addressing gender prosecution and ensuring gender justice. Therefore, there is a need for a nuanced political terminology to capture the Taliban atrocities in their totality. Despite similarities, the brutality of the Taliban and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan remain distinct from ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid. In “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” Rabea Eghbariah suggests the need for new language to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition: “We needed the language to capture the distinctive type of brutality, to describe the totality of these experiences, to let the world know about the particularity of these catastrophes and draw universal lessons informed by these histories.” Similarly, the Taliban’s unique combination of religious totalitarianism, gender apartheid, and ethnic supremacy demands new conceptual tools to fully comprehend and address this form of systematic oppression.
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Omar Sadr is a research fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) and the founding editor of Negotiating Ideas Society, a podcast and online magazine.
