Political fiction meets gender myth: Post-conflict reconstruction, "democratisation" and women's rights

This article aims to draw attention to the fact that gender issues are becoming politicised in novel and counterproductive ways in a new geopolitical context where armed interventions usher in blueprints for governance underwritten by international donors and global institutions. These blueprints include efforts at gender mainstreaming, against the background of a new conventional wisdom concerning the need to include women in post-conflict reconstruction, backed by UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Using the case of post-Taliban Afghanistan, an attempt is made to demonstrate that technocratic blueprints that do not take account of the nature of political settlements (or lack thereof) in specific post-conflict contexts are likely to remain ineffective at best, or to backfire, inadvertently exposing and disempowering the constituencies that most need support. The type of intervention that involves patient capacity and coalition building far exceeds the time frames and resources of interventions dominated by "project" cycles.