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Palwasha Hassan is currently the Jennings Randolph Afghanistan Fellow at the US Institute of Peace. She serves as Country Director for Rights & Democracy in Afghanistan. She has more than 15 years of experience in women’s development and empowerment projects and is the founding member of many existing networks and women and human rights groups in Afghanistan, including the Afghan Women’s Network, the Women and Street Children Project, and Roazana. She has served as a representative of civil society groups in numerous constitutional and peacekeeping negotiations including the Constitutional Loya Jirga, the Peace Jirga on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Afghanistan Reconstruction Forum in Tokyo. Hassan holds a master’s degree in Post-war Recovery Studies from York University, UK.
Women's Agency in Afghanistan: From Survivors to Agents of Change
Originally posted December 2009
Often, policy debates on the empowerment of women in Afghanistan are impaired by the historic backlashes against radical top-down reforms and women’s emancipation (e.g., unseating kings) or by the assumption that the male-dominated culture makes it nearly impossible to create space for the advancement of women’s rights. As a result, the effort to develop a cohesive strategy for enhancing women’s participation in the reconstruction agenda is hampered.
