Gender Apartheid and the Politics of Accountability: Multilevel Power Games in Global Responses to Women’s Rights in Afghanistan

The Taliban’s systematic exclusion of women and girls from public life in Afghanistan constitutes ‘gender apartheid’ – the most extreme form of gender-based oppression in the world today. This paper explores the limits of international legal accountability in the context of anti-gender global politics. Drawing on the concept of ‘gendered multilevel power games’ (Aggestam and True 2021), this paper examines how four states – Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia – invoke women’s rights in holding the Taliban, as Afghanistan’s de facto authority, accountable at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for violations of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). It analyses the interplay between the domestic and foreign policies of these states, highlighting the contradictions between their normative commitments and strategic interests across diplomacy, security, migration and human rights mechanisms including the UN Human Rights Council’s 2025 adoption of an accountability framework for Afghanistan. The paper argues that without a gendered accountability framework centring Afghan women’s agency, even “principled” states risk reproducing women’s marginalisation and insecurity.