University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs
Ridgway Center for International Security Studies
Gender Apartheid Documentation in Afghanistan Working Group
September 2025 - April 2026
The Gender Apartheid Documentation in Afghanistan Working Group is a student research initiative based at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public and International Affairs, operating in partnership with the Ridgway Center for International Security Studies and Women Leading Peace. Launched in the fall of 2025 under the direction of Zakira Rasooli, the group spent the 2025–2026 academic year documenting the Taliban's systematic oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan, building the evidentiary and analytical foundation needed to support the international legal effort to recognize gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.
The working group's research joins a global coalition of Afghan civil society organizations, human rights advocates, and legal scholars who have been leading this fight for decades. Our role is to support and amplify that work, not to define it. The summary below was written by the students of the Gender Apartheid Working Group, to serve as a public record of our work which we are deeply proud of.
(NOTE: This page is under construction.)
What We've Produced &
Our Research Outputs
1. Taliban Decree Timeline
Chronological record of Taliban laws, edicts, and decrees since August 2021, verified against primary sources.
A comprehensive, chronologically organized timeline of Taliban laws, edicts, and decrees issued since August 2021, documenting the systematic restriction of women and girls from education, employment, healthcare, freedom of movement, and public life. Each entry is verified against primary and secondary sources and cross-referenced with local Afghan journalism, activist documentation networks, and where accessible,Taliban government records. The timeline is designed to serve as an evidentiary resource for advocates, researchers, and legal practitioners working on gender apartheid recognition and accountability.
2. Working Group Report
Written analysis of Taliban governance, the gender apartheid framework, and legal pathways to accountability.
The working group report presents a comprehensive analysis of the Taliban's model of governance since August 2021, examining how its accumulation of over 200 laws, edicts, and decrees targeting women and girls constitutes gender apartheid as a systemic and institutionalized practice rather than a collection of isolated violations. The report situates this analysis within the broader international legal effort to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, surveying existing accountability mechanisms including proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, the Permanent People's Tribunal's December 2025 ruling, and the ongoing Crimes Against Humanity Treaty negotiations. It draws on the working group's primary source documentation, Afghan civil society research, and legal scholarship to outline the evidentiary foundations and legal pathways available to hold the Taliban accountable. The report is intended as a resource for advocates, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working at the intersection of gender justice and international law.
3. Organizations Directory
Open-source living directory of 23+ organizations working on gender apartheid recognition and accountability.
An open-source, living directory mapping the ecosystem of organizations working to document gender apartheid and advance accountability; from women-led organizations operating inside Afghanistan to international NGOs and multilateral bodies. Developed in partnership with Women Leading Peace, the Ridgway Center, and Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, the directory currently holds 23 organizations and is organized by category, location, working language, and ECOSOC accreditation status to help stakeholders navigate the field and identify opportunities for coordination and capacity-building support. Organizations are invited to complete the directory survey and share it with their networks.
The Research Process &
How We Worked
Fall 2025
Training and Research
The working group was formed through SPIA's annual working group recruitment process, in which students attend an information session at the start of the academic year and apply to join their top choices. The eight students who came together in fall 2025 brought backgrounds spanning international affairs, gender studies, law, and public policy, a range of perspectives that shaped how the group approached its work from the beginning.
While we began to conduct research, Zakira Rasooli led the group through the conceptual and ethical foundations of the project: the gender apartheid framework, the history of Taliban governance and Afghan women's resistance, how to document human rights abuses for international legal purposes, and the work of the Afghan civil society organizations that have been at the forefront of this effort for years. A central thread running through our early training was positionality. As English-speaking American graduate students, the group recognized that their perspectives had been shaped by Western discourses, and Zakira pushed us to ground our research approach in decolonial ways of thinking by directing our knowledge acquisition toward Afghan sources, and remaining careful not to frame Afghan women's activism as a recent development or a response to Western intervention. The fight to recognize gender apartheid has been led by and belongs to Afghan women, and has been ongoing since the Taliban's first occupation in the 1990s.
With that foundation in place, the group divided into two research teams:
September
October
Team focused on identifying the organizations inside Afghanistan and international NGOs working to advance codification of gender apartheid in international law.
1. Organizations Team
Team focused on locating and documenting the Taliban's edicts, laws, and decrees as primary evidence of gender apartheid.
2. Edicts & Laws Team
Very quickly, both teams were presented with challenges. The Taliban's government website proved difficult to access consistently, and original postings of decrees and edicts had in many cases been deleted. This was likely, we concluded, as part of the Taliban's efforts to project legitimacy while continuing to enforce the same restrictions on the ground. Zakira offered to translate documents available only in Dari or Pashto, and the group worked carefully to preserve every source the moment it was found, knowing it could disappear. Many organizations in the directory had taken steps to remain anonymous or hidden given the serious risks they face, which required the group to navigate the research with particular care.
November &
December
Around mid-November, the teams switched tracks, the decree documentation team shifted to organization mapping, and vice versa, ensuring that every member of the group developed a full understanding of both dimensions of the research. That rotation also deepened the group's collective grasp of how the Taliban's documented policies connect to the broader ecosystem of resistance and accountability work being done around the world.
Spring 2026
Documentation and Production
The spring semester brought a shift from research and discovery to documentation and production, with our group reorganizing into a visuals team and a writing team. The two tracks ran in parallel but were not siloed. Midway through the semester, the group held peer editing sessions where the visuals team reviewed the writing team's report drafts, working through questions of framing, what information was essential, and how to avoid repetition across a document covering dense and interconnected material.
January
The organizations directory also occupied an important share of our time. Before a single organization was added, our spent significant time building a Qualtrics survey that would serve as both a data collection tool and an ongoing submission mechanism for organizations to join the directory themselves. Designing the survey required balancing thoroughness with accessibility, and ensuring that responses from more private or at-risk networks would not expose identifying information. The directory was mainly built through the group's own research rather than survey responses, which are designed to grow the directory going forward. It currently holds 23 organizations, organized by category, location, working language, and ECOSOC accreditation status.
February
Building the timeline required a different kind of labor. The visuals team first had to make a series of editorial decisions about how to tell the visual story of Taliban governance, settling on a color-coded vertical timeline in descending chronological order from August 2021 to the present, with each edict, law, and decree categorized by what aspect of women's and girls' lives it targeted: mobility, education, employment, healthcare, dress code and bodily autonomy, political participation, and others. Each entry carries its own citation. The Afghanistan Justice Archive, which maintains a comprehensive database of Taliban governance, was an essential resource throughout. But when we returned to our fall research in February to begin building the timeline in earnest, many of the original source links had already gone dead. Recovering them required creative detective work like searching decree names and dates on Google, sometimes translating terms back into Persian to surface sources that hadn't been indexed in English. In the process, our team located more primary sources than it had found in the fall.
March
Covers of the preliminary timeline and directory documents:
Some group members had the capacity to support Zakira in planning the April 17 conference, and the full group held a practice run of their presentation at one of their regular meetings before the convening. Working group members presented our research to an audience that included some of the leading scholars, lawyers, and practitioners in the gender apartheid field. Standing alongside figures whose careers have been defined by this work, and whose names appear in the international legal record, was a humbling and educational experience for us. It affirmed that the work we had done throughout year and made us feel as if we were truly part of a much larger effort, and that we also had a role to play in it going forward.
Looking back, one of the biggest lessons that we learned is that this kind of work takes longer than it looks. The three major deliverables: the timeline, the directory, and the report; were produced between January and April, after a full semester of foundational research. Future working groups continuing or expanding on this project would benefit from beginning the production phase as early as possible.
April
Conclusions
Final Remarks &
Student Reflections
"The Gender Apartheid Documentation Working Group has been an incredibly rewarding experience as it has deepened my understanding of the crisis that Afghan women endure and fight against. The challenge of gathering primary sources as evidence of the Taliban's implementation of gender apartheid is one that requires continued effort and support. It also has illuminated the obstacles that women activists in Afghanistan face in pushing back against this injustice. I am in awe of the courage and fortitude of these organizations, and I trust that the support from this award will allow us to serve as true partners in the great work that they are doing. In addition to the inspiration of Afghan and global organizations, it has been a genuine privilege to learn from and work with Zakira Rasooli and my peers on this project."
— Katie Campbell
[Additional Student Reflections to be added soon]
Working Group Members
Acknowledgements
The working group extends its deepest gratitude to Zakira Rasooli, whose guidance, mentorship, and intellectual generosity made this project possible. Her insistence on centering Afghan women's leadership and grounding the group's work in ethical research practice shaped everything that followed.
We thank the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public and International Affairs and the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies for their institutional support, and Afghans for a Better Tomorrow for their partnership in the development of the organizations directory.
Most importantly, we acknowledge the Afghan women, activists, journalists, lawyers, and civil society organizations whose courageous and sustained work over decades has built the foundation on which this research stands. We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to it.