Western politicians are worried about women's rights in Afghanistan, and rightly so, but we should remember that Western intervention in the late 20th c. destroyed a gender-progressive government to replace it with Islamic fundamentalists. Perhaps some reflection is in order.
In 1978, Afghanistan's socialist government, the DRA, abolished sharia law, declared full equality for women, and prioritized women's education. The project was led by Masuma Esmati-Wardak, the first female member of the Afghan Parliament, who served as the Minister of Education.
Women held several leading positions in the DRA. Most notably, the feminist revolutionary Anahita Ratebzad served as deputy head of state from 1980-1986. Afghanistan had a female VP long before the US did.
The United States and Britain sought to destroy the DRA, under the banner of the Cold War, by arming and funding the Mujahideen, a jihadist movement with violently anti-feminist views. They succeeded, and the DRA collapsed in 1992. Ratebzad was forced into exile.
The Mujahideen formed a government in that year, with the support of the United States, and began to reverse women's rights. The Taliban, a rival Islamist faction with similar ideology, rose during the chaos of the DRA collapse, took power in 1996, and oppressed women brutally.
This is not to romanticize the DRA; far from it. The point is that when it comes to women's rights, the West's role in Afghanistan is much more complicated, and troubling, than contemporary discourse would make it seem.

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More from @jasonhickel

10 Sep
I am proud to join thousands of other scientists calling for a binding Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that will end new expansion and phase out existing production in a fair and just way. If you support this call, please sign on here and share: fossilfueltreaty.org/open-letter
To stay under 1.5C, we need to cut fossil fuel production by an average of at least 6% per year between 2020-2030, and rich countries need to lead on this.
To put this in clearer terms, total fossil fuel production and use needs to be cut in half in the course of this decade. That's the reality. And right now our governments' policy commitments are nowhere near that trajectory. It's not even on the agenda.
Read 4 tweets
8 Sep
Here is a brief response to Noah Smith's recent article on degrowth. Most of the claims have already been dealt with in the published literature, and others I agree with, so there's not much interesting to say. But a few thoughts:
Smith relies heavily on McAfee's claims about the US "decoupling" GDP from resource use. Unfortunately the data he uses does not account for resources involved in offshored production. This is a significant empirical error that I have addressed here: foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/mor…
When we account for this, as the Material Footprint indicator does, the US economy is not absolutely decoupling GDP from resource use (not just the world as a whole). So too with other rich economies. This point is well established in the literature: pnas.org/content/112/20…
Read 16 tweets
6 Aug
Critics of degrowth simply don't read degrowth literature. This take on emissions keeps making the rounds, so here's a brief thread on what it gets wrong:
First, literally nobody argues that GDP cannot be absolutely decoupled from emissions. Such a claim would be absurd: to get to zero emissions, we would have to reduce GDP to zero. This is obviously ridiculous.
*Of course* GDP can be absolutely decoupled from emissions. Indeed, it has been happening in several rich nations for some time, even in consumption-based terms. We've known this for ages. Hello, renewable energy!
Read 16 tweets
4 Aug
I'm excited to announce that we have a new article in Nature Energy today. This is an important piece, and we agonized over every sentence. It's behind a paywall, but you can get a free PDF here, and a short thread follows: static1.squarespace.com/static/59bc0e6… nature.com/articles/s4156…
1. Existing climate mitigation scenarios *start* with the assumption that all countries must grow, indefinitely, regardless of how rich they already are. The problem is that growth makes climate mitigation *much* more difficult to achieve... and this creates a real conundrum.
2. To square growth with the Paris goals, existing scenarios are forced to rely heavily on spectacular assumptions about technological change, including massive negative emissions schemes and unprecedented rates of GDP/energy decoupling.
Read 11 tweets
4 Aug
I welcome thoughtful critiques of degrowth, and I often learn from them. But this piece by Kelsey Piper is so wildly off the mark that it's hard to know where to start. Here are a few responses, in the thread below. vox.com/future-perfect…
1. Piper says degrowth is "most compelling as a personal ethos, a lens on your consumption habits". In fact degrowth literature explicitly *rejects* this approach in favour of a system-level critique. It's the economic system that's the problem.
2. Piper cites a paper saying that decoupling of GDP from emissions is happening in some rich countries. Yes, of course it is! Renewable energy! The problem is that it is not feasible to decarbonize fast enough for 1.5C if high-income nations continue to pursue growth.
Read 22 tweets
10 Jul
This is one of the most important books I've read in a long time. Clear, urgent, powerful - a manifesto for decolonization and climate justice that pushes the horizons of our imagination. Every page is gold. Read it, share it, discuss it.
If you are a journalist, consider writing a review. If you are a teacher, assign it to your students. If you are a podcaster, reach out to @The_Red_Nation to get someone from the movement to talk about it on your show.
"Overconsumption in the Global North is directly enabled by the dispossession of Indigenous and Black life and imperial wars in the Global South. We need a revolution of values that recenters relationships to one another and the Earth over profits."
Read 12 tweets

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