Knowledge Hub

Publications & Reports

🧑‍⚖️ I. Gender, War & Taliban Governance

1. Making Feminist (Non) Sense of War and Gender in Afghanistan

Date: 2025
Type: Peer-reviewed journal article (Conflict, Security & Development) – Co-authored

Summary: Reflects on how gender narratives have been constructed amid decades of war in Afghanistan, critiquing how international interventions have often instrumentalised women’s rights without transforming structural inequalities.

2. Discipline and Domination: The Taliban’s Rule Over Women as Statecraft

Date: 2025
Type: Policy chapter (Observer Research Foundation) – Sole author
Summary: Argues that Taliban restrictions on women are not incidental but part of a deliberate political strategy, embedding gender discrimination into governance and control structures.

3. Afghan Women under Taliban Rule: Are There Any Good Options?

- - Date: 2023
  - Type: Policy Paper (Women without Borders) – Sole author
  - Summary: Analyses the rollback of women’s rights after August 2021, arguing for sustained global advocacy and conditional engagement that prioritises women’s participation in education, work and public life.

📉 II. Livelihoods, Poverty & Layered Crises

4. Livelihoods and Welfare Amidst Layered Crises in Afghanistan

Date: 2022
Type: Journal article (IDS Bulletin) – Co-authored
Summary: Explores how overlapping shocks — conflict, pandemic, drought and political upheaval — combine to deepen economic vulnerability, especially among youth and women, and shape coping strategies like debt and migration.

5. “We Will Die in Poverty Before Dying by COVID”: Young Adults and Multi-Layered Crises in Afghanistan

Date: 2022
Type: Synthesis report (AREU) – Co-authored
Summary: Investigates compound crises and their impact on young Afghan adults’ well-being and livelihood strategies, highlighting increased economic despair and long-term exclusion following the 2021 political shift.

6. Sowing the Wheat Seeds of Afghanistan’s Future

Date: 2022
Type: Journal article (Plants, People, Planet) – Co-authored
Summary: Interdisciplinary analysis linking agricultural sustainability — particularly wheat production — to food security and socio-economic stability amid ongoing conflict and climate stress.

🌍 III. Humanitarian Crisis, Ethics & Aid Constraints

7. Afghanistan’s Freezing Winter: Humanitarian Crisis and the Taliban’s Ban on Women Aid Workers

Date: 2023
Type: Expert commentary (ODI) – Sole author
Summary: Highlights the impact of Taliban restrictions on women aid workers, showing how this undermines humanitarian access to female beneficiaries and raises ethical dilemmas.

8. Pathways to Tackling Food Insecurity

Date: 2023
Type: Expert commentary (ODI) – Sole author
Summary: Focuses on structural causes of food insecurity — economic collapse, governance failures, climatic stress — and calls for integrated humanitarian and development responses.

9. Navigating Ethical Dilemmas for Humanitarian Action in Afghanistan

Date: 2023
Type: Research report (Humanitarian Outcomes / HRRI) – Co-authored
Summary: Analyses ethical and operational dilemmas for humanitarian actors operating under Taliban restrictions, especially regarding the ban on women aid workers and tensions between principle and practice.

10. Seismic Shifts: How a Humanitarian Sector in Upheaval Responded to the 2025 Afghanistan Earthquake

Date: 2025
Type: HRRI research report – Co-authored

Summary: Evaluates the humanitarian response to the 31 August 2025 earthquake amid funding cuts and gender-restricted operational environments, documenting challenges, roles of actors, and ethical trade-offs.

🏛 IV. Governance & Political Transformation

11. Local Governance Under Taliban Rule (2021–2023)

Date: 2024
Type: Research report – Sole author
Summary: Investigates how the Taliban consolidated provincial and district governance after 2021, combining traditional authority structures with ideological control, and assesses implications for civic legitimacy and institutional function.

📘 V. Broader Themes

12. Scholars-at-Risk: Challenges Facing Humanity, Can Science Diplomacy Help?

Date: 2023–2024
Type: Co-authored academic article
Summary: Discusses threats to academic freedom and explores whether science diplomacy can support scholars in conflict-affected contexts.

13. Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan — by Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi

Date: 2021
Type: Ethnographic book — referenced for thematic connection
Summary: Explores the lives of women labelled “runaways” seeking autonomy at the edges of Afghan society, showing how they reinterpret piety and agency under patriarchal constraints.