From Victimhood to Activism: An Empirical Study of South Asian Women's Rights Movements amidst State Violence

Abstract

This paper argues that South Asian women assert their autonomy and confront repressive state institutions by negotiating with the epistemologies of political oppression within a misogynistic social order. In addition, this essay delineates the epistemic practices of autocratic regimes to understand how they inform the objectives and methodologies of women’s resistance work. This paper’s argument is substantiated through the analysis of three distinct South Asian women’s rights organizations: the petitioners of the 1991 Kunan Poshpora mass rape case, who contested the military occupation in Kashmir, India; the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), which protested the fundamentalist doctrines of General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Pakistan in the 1980s; and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which opposed the series of violent regimes that took power in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979. The results of this study indicate that South Asian women across a variety of political structures and national contexts operationalize their epistemic positionality to resist autocracies’ architectures of political and gender violence. Women accomplish this by engaging strategically with spaces of participation and tailoring protest tactics to address the injustices to which they are subjected. These findings signify the advantageous perspectives that women possess when comprehending political violence and emphasize the need to include women’s standpoints when discerning systems of oppression.