Five Years After Kabul’s Fall: What Women's Exclusion Reveals about Political Transitions

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Five years after Kabul’s fall, Afghanistan offers a broader lesson about political transitions: inclusive or durable change is not inherent to the collapse of an old order. Across Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt, women have been central actors in movements for political transformation yet are mainly marginalized when new political institutions are created. This pattern suggests that gender exclusion is not simply a failure in representation but also undermines state legitimacy and accountability, as well as the resilience of the emerging political order. 

Introduction: 

August 2026 marks five years since Kabul fell to the Taliban. The collapse of Afghanistan's republic is usually analyzed through the lenses of military withdrawal, state failure, and counterterrorism. Yet one of its most enduring lessons concerns the role of women in transformative political transition. Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghan women spent two decades expanding civic participation and public leadership, only to find themselves largely excluded from the negotiations that shaped their country's political future after the 2021 fall. What does Afghanistan teach us about how political transitions succeed or fail? 

Afghanistan's recent experience reflects a broader pattern observed in revolutionary political settlements. Although the 2001 Bonn Agreement recognized fundamental rights and included Afghan women more meaningfully than later negotiations, those commitments were not sustained during the political process that culminated in the Doha Agreement of 2020. 

This trajectory over twenty years illustrates that women's political inclusion should not be confined to the founding stages of a political order. Although not fully realized, women’s rights under the republican government were incomparably stronger than the current Taliban. Accordingly, that government was perceived as much more legitimate than the current. Tragically, the state’s greater legitimacy arising from women’s inclusion at the post-Bonn formative stages were lost at Doha. As a consequence, the incoming 2021Taliban government was all the more illegitimate, undermining hope for women’s rights in contemporary Afghanistan.

If a post-revolution government seeks to establish and grow its legitimacy, respect for women’s basic human rights must remain integral to negotiations that reshape state institutions. Similar patterns can be observed in Iran's 1979 revolution and Egypt's post-2011 transition, where women played central roles in political mobilization but exercised far less influence over the institutional arrangements that followed. Together, these cases suggest that women's political inclusion is an indicator of the legitimacy of revolutionary political settlements rather than simply a question of rights or representation.

Afghanistan: The Cost of Excluding Women from Political Settlements 

The events surrounding Afghanistan’s 2021 transition demonstrate the consequences of treating women’s participation as secondary to security objectives. The Doha process reflected a broader pattern in which international diplomacy prioritized ending the conflict and facilitating military withdrawal over ensuring an inclusive political settlement. Afghan women were not meaningfully represented in negotiations that would determine the country’s future, and the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement did not include protections for women’s rights. 

This omission significantly weakened the foundations of a legitimate transition and so future governments. Women’s rights were treated as an ‘issue’ to be separately addressed instead of broadly acknowledging fundamental human rights from the outset. Consequently, negotiators left the future of millions of Afghan women’s rights vulnerable to political winds. 

Afghanistan's experience is not unique. Other revolutionary transitions demonstrate a similar gap between women's participation in movements for political change and their influence over the political institutions that emerge afterward. Iran's 1979 Revolution and Egypt's 2011 uprising provide important comparative cases. Although these transitions differed significantly from Afghanistan in their origins, political dynamics, and outcomes, they share a critical feature: women were active participants in moments of political transformation but were subsequently marginalized in shaping the political order that followed. 

The Regional Pattern: Women Lead Change, but Are Excluded from Shaping What Follows 

Afghanistan’s failure to enshrine women’s rights in political transition is not unique. Across the region, women have repeatedly been at the forefront of political movements, yet their participation has declined once revolutionary moments give way to formal negotiations and institution-building. The critical question is not whether women contribute to political change (they do consistently). The question is whether political actors will recognize them as equal actors in shaping what system and institutions that come next.

Iran offers one of the clearest examples. During the 1979 Revolution, women from diverse backgrounds participated in demonstrations that helped overthrow the monarchy. Many viewed the revolution as an opportunity to build a more just and representative society. Instead, the years that followed witnessed the rollback of many legal protections, increased restrictions on women’s autonomy, and the institution of compulsory hijab as a symbol of state authority over women’s bodies and public participation. 

Egypt’s experience after the 2011 revolution demonstrates a similar pattern. Women were highly visible in protests across the country, particularly in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where they demanded an end to authoritarian rule and greater political representation. Their participation challenged traditional assumptions about women’s role in public life and reflected a broader vision of citizenship. 

However, when the transition moved from protests to political institutions, women became increasingly marginalized. Constitutional negotiations and emerging political structures remained dominated by male elites, while debates about women’s rights and representation were often treated as secondary concerns. Consequently, the state actors that came into power after Tahrir, as they failed to genuinely ensure that women’s rights in Egypt would not be diminished, were perceived by an increasing number of Egyptians as illegitimate. It can be argued the democratic opening that followed the revolution ultimately narrowed as more secular Egyptians soured on the new government. As a result, political institutions were all the weaker, permitting secular authoritarian actors to retake the state as they did. 

The Egyptian experience demonstrates that women’s mass participation alone is not enough to secure lasting political change. Revolutions can remove leaders without transforming the institutions that determine who holds power. Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan reveal a pattern whereby women are recognized as symbols of resistance but excluded as architects of political order. 

Gender Justice as a Measure of Political Stability 

The experiences of Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt reveal why this approach is flawed. Gender justice should not be secondary to or distinct from the perceived legitimacy that fosters lasting political stability. Indeed, it is one condition that makes stability possible. Another is that the agreement be accepted as legitimate by the affected people – all of

them. Political settlements gain legitimacy not only from ending conflict but further from ensuring that diverse segments of society have a role in shaping institutions. 

When women are excluded from negotiations, constitutional processes, and governance structures, political institutions are shaped by a narrower set of actors and interests. As the experiences of Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt illustrate, such exclusion weakens the representative foundations of new political orders and reduces institutional accountability. In the absence of broad-based participation, political authority becomes concentrated in fewer hands, making it easier for authoritarian actors bereft of broad political support to consolidate power and more difficult for democratic institutions to resist erosion. 

The systematic exclusion of women should therefore be understood as more than discrimination. It is an early indicator of broader decline in democratic governance. Governments that restrict women’s participation in public life frequently limit civic space, political pluralism, and democratic accountability. 

Policy Implications Five Years After Kabul 

The comparison of Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt suggests three broader implications for understanding political transitions. First, women's participation should be viewed as an indicator of the legitimacy of political transitions rather than as a secondary objective to 

be addressed after political settlements are reached. Across all three cases, women played central roles in movements for political change but exercised far less influence over the institutions that emerged afterward. 

Second, these cases challenge the tendency to separate security objectives from questions of political inclusion. The Doha process illustrates how prioritizing conflict resolution while postponing representation can undermine the legitimacy of political settlements. Similarly, Egypt's transition demonstrates that institutional change without inclusive governance remains vulnerable to democratic reversal. 

Finally, systematic restrictions on women's political participation should be understood as indicators of authoritarian consolidation rather than isolated gender policies. Across these cases, gender exclusion coincided with shrinking civic space, weakened accountability, and the concentration of political power. 

Conclusion 

Five years after Kabul's fall, Afghanistan offers more than a case study of humanitarian collapse. Together with Iran and Egypt, it illustrates a pattern in which women are central to movements for political change but remain marginalized when new political

institutions are negotiated. The authoritarian systems and the political instability they confront is a result of the majority’s perception of their government as illegitimate. This comparison suggests that gender exclusion is not simply a consequence of failed transitions but a factor that shapes future systems’ legitimacy and durability. Rather than treating gender justice as a secondary human rights concern, policymakers should recognize it as an essential dimension of inclusive governance, institutional resilience, and sustainable political transition. Nazila Jamshidi is a human rights and governance professional specializing in the intersection of gender and political transformation in conflict-affected regions. Her extensive field experience includes managing democratization and women’s inclusion programs across 27 Afghan provinces. Jamshidi, whose work has appeared in the BBC and The Diplomat, holds degrees from Georgetown University and a master’s in Human Rights from Columbia University.

What Women’s Exclusion Reveals about Political Transitions.

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