Apartheid is a term used to describe the systemic oppression, segregation and marginalisation of a specific group of people based on race, ethnic or religious identity. The South African apartheid of black South Africans is well known, and there is major contention surrounding whether Israel’s brutal and repressive actions against Palestinians should be categorised as apartheid. There is also an increasing push by women’s rights activists for the ongoing repression of women by oppressive states to be described as a form of apartheid as well.
A couple of years ago, a campaign was launched by Afghan human rights activists calling for the repressive discrimination against women by the resurgent Taliban regime to be codified as a crime against humanity. Similarly, human rights activists have also begun arguing that the term gender apartheid also be applied to describe what is happening to women in Iran. Such women rights campaigners argue that the ideological and institutionalised nature of the systemic subjugation and deprivation of women in countries like Afghanistan and Iran requires international censure because national laws have been specifically crafted to constrain the lives of women and their role in society.
The plight of Afghan women under Taliban 2.0 has been worsening. Since retaking Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have issued dozens of edicts curtailing the rights of all Afghan women and girls. While girls are allowed to obtain primary education, they cannot go to secondary school, or to university. Women are also banned from most forms of employment, except providing healthcare to other women, and teaching girls in primary school. The Taliban have also resorted to use of flogging and stoning against women who defy these edicts.
The situation in Iran is not as drastic. Iranian women have also faced major restrictions for over four decades. Following widespread protests in 2022 triggered by the death in police custody of the young girl, Mahsa Amini, who was apprehended for not wearing a hijab properly, Iran has further tightened its veiling laws. Fearing further backlash, the surveillance of women and girls has also intensified. A UN Special Rapporteur has thus called the draconian implementation of hijab laws a form of gender apartheid. Conversely, many human rights advocates also recognise that the situation for women in Iran is neither comparable to the plight of women in Afghanistan, nor can it be classified as gender apartheid.
If gender apartheid was to be codified as a crime, states would theoretically be obliged to uphold the integrity of international laws, and it may also increase pressure on other countries to grant asylum to women and girls fleeing gender apartheid. However, the notion of gender apartheid itself needs to be reevaluated for it to have greater legitimacy. Currently, this notion fails to consider the deep-rooted factors which have given rise to the evidently suffocating environment for women in certain countries.
Gender apartheid is not just a local cultural phenomenon. Instead, it is a system shaped by historical and current geostrategic realities. In many colonised societies, for instance, where matriarchal and more egalitarian norms were common, European colonisers introduced Victorian gender norms to undermine women’s traditional roles in trade, farming and politics.
Colonisers too used the lower status of women as a justification for domination by presenting themselves as civilising supposedly backward cultures, using the guise of saving ‘brown women from brown men’ to subjugate entire societies. Global powers have relied on similar narratives more recently as a rationale for waging war. For instance, the US emphasised the brutality of the first Taliban regime against women to justify their overthrow, and two decades of foreign military occupation, which exerted a significant human toll on all Afghans, including women.
It would thus be more accurate to recognise gender apartheid as being a product of not only indigenous patriarchies but colonial legacies as well. Contemporary hegemonic actions also continue to manipulate the notion of gender empowerment to further myopic strategic interests, which often also undermine the status of women.
