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We are thrilled to congratulate Priscyll Anctil Avoine and Lida Ahmad on winning the Loop Best Blog Prize for their blog piece UN collusion with the Taliban is betraying Afghan women.
In 2022, The Loop inaugurated its annual Best Blog Prize to reward a contribution of exceptional value. It has now conferred its third £500 prize on the author of a blog piece judged by our independent jury to be the best in that calendar year.
This prize allows the Loop's team to showcase articles with particular relevance to current events; honour pieces likely to influence political opinion; and highlight those which might appeal to a readership beyond academe.
After careful deliberation and a rigorous scoring process, the jury has chosen to award the 2024 prize to a blog piece that reveals how the UN, in excluding women from the negotiating table, is perpetuating a barbaric regime in Afghanistan.
In the winning piece, co-authors Priscyll and Lida draw on their experiences as (variously) researchers, asylum advisers and activists to argue that the UN is 'whitewashing' the Taliban.
Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies, Swedish Defence University. Her research focuses on embodied and emotional processes in contemporary wars, with a particular emphasis on women’s political militancy in leftist insurgencies.
Find out moreLida Ahmad is a sociologist and asylum advisor with ten years' experience on women’s rights and gender-based violence in Afghanistan, where she has also been involved in activist campaigns.
She researches the impact of gender-based violence on mental health, and the socio-political discourses of sexual violence during armed conflict.
Find out moreIn their laudatory comments, the jury offered the following:
We particularly admired this blog piece’s social and political relevance, timely nature, and excellent writing... It makes full use of the form’s freedoms to link research findings to political conviction, and powerfully confronts the double standards of states and political institutions in clear, impactful prose. [Priscyll and Lida's] piece explains the impact of Taliban policies on other marginalised communities, while focusing specifically on their impact on Afghan women. It covers an impressive amount of ground, without ever becoming thinly argued.
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Keywords: Conflict, Gender, Islam, Religion, Freedom, Social Media