This thesis examines contestations over gender violence as points of entry into an analysis of gender, politics and sovereign power in contemporary Afghanistan. It explores the evolving parameters of what ‘counts’ as violence against women in Afghanistan, articulated in legal frameworks and practices, in public and media debates and in the interventions of political leaders, diplomats and aid workers. The thesis asks whether violence against women has become a governance issue in Afghanistan and what this means for the position of women and for broader relations of power. These questions are investigated through an examination of the origins and fate of a new law on violence against women, a series of controversies over women’s shelters, attempts to bestow recognition on informal justice processes and the trajectories of individual episodes of violence as they travelled through different and sometimes competing legal forums. I show how the outcome of these struggles have the potential to redraw boundaries between government and family domains, and to subordinate women to kinship power, or alternatively, constitute them as independent legal persons. The thesis further analyses negotiations over and interventions into violence against women as revealing of shifting domains and claims of sovereignty, of projects of power and of political technologies. The processes detailed in the thesis illuminate a landscape of plural and competing legal regimes that in specific times and places presided over individual episodes of gender violence The thesis also shows that far from operating as a singular bloc, Western forays in Afghanistan produced multiple and contradictory effects on women’s security and protection.

Feminist literature has been demonstrating that women’s mobilisation in general has played a relevant role in the promotion of political processes designed to tackle gender inequality. Regarding the specific context of Mozambique, the goal of this dissertation is to examine the role that women’s organisations of civil society – framed in the context of a broader Mozambican women’s movement – had in the struggle against domestic violence, which resulted in the approval of a law against domestic violence in 2009. This dissertation seeks to address two major lacunae in the literature. First there is no single study examining the political impact of the Mozambican women’s mobilisation against domestic violence from a theoretical perspective. Second, there is limited empirical research on how such a mobilisation shaped the entire struggle against domestic violence. It is argued and empirically demonstrated that – integrated in the broader women’s movement – women’s organisations were able to become agents of social and political transformations in regard to the issue of domestic violence. Women’s organisations played three distinct roles: articulators, agenda setters, and legislation shapers. Firstly, the organisations articulated the problem of domestic violence as a gendered process mostly affecting women. Secondly, the women’s organisations placed the problem of domestic violence on the political agenda, contesting the lack of formal mechanisms that tackled the issue – particularly legislation – and trying to shape the social perception regarding such a type of violence. Thirdly, those organisations were able to shape legislative outcomes by drafting a law and successfully lobbying members of parliament for its approval. The empirical evidence for my argument was gathered through fieldwork in the greater area of Maputo. Following a qualitative approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews to members of civil society associations involved in the struggle against domestic violence and to members of the Mozambican parliament. My findings contribute directly to the literature on Mozambican women’s movements and indirectly to the broad feminist theoretical and empirical work on tracing the action of civil society’s groups and on women’s movements as having a transformative impact on gender relations and formal politics.

This thesis contributes new and unique evidence to the limited body of empirical literature on men’s stranger intrusion in public space, commonly termed ‘street harassment’, through a transdisciplinary study bringing a philosophical framework to the study of violence against women and girls (VAWG). Analysis of 50 women’s accounts given during a three stage research process is presented, alongside the development of a theoretical framework combining feminist approaches to VAWG with the gendered existential-phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir and insights on habitual embodiments from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Using this theoretical framework the empirical evidence is investigated for what it reveals about modalities of embodied subjectivity women enact in public spaces. The research had four central aims and it is the achievement of these aims that forms the unique contribution of this thesis. Firstly it develops the reciprocal practice of translating philosophy into the vernacular of women’s experiences of VAWG, finding that a philosophical perspective assists a feminist reframing of medical/legal models of VAWG. Secondly it explores reconnecting feminist research on VAWG to women’s ordinary experience of men’s intrusion, revealing how the necessary focus on policy has led to a steep rise in knowledge about some forms of VAWG to the detriment of investigating men’s violence and intrusion in women’s everyday lives. The third aim, to understand the consequences of men’s intrusion for how women live and experience their bodily-self, resulted in a theoretical framework which suggests possibilities in the work of Simone de Beauvoir for feminists looking to reconnect questions of women’s agency and autonomy to a context of structural power relations. Finally this research produced a new body of evidence regarding the practice and experience of men’s stranger intrusion in public spaces, through a research process which created new tools for researching the ordinary. In the pursuit of these four aims this research found that, far from the trivialisation it is often afforded, the possibility and reality of men’s intrusion forms a fundamental factor in how women understand and enact their embodied selfhood.

Women continue to be subjected to violations of their human rights. Violence towards them is a crucial mechanism through which women are subjugated. Gender based violence is a silent global epidemic (UNDP 2011) and its devastating effects cannot be underestimated. This thesis proposes an integrated geographical or place-based approach to understand gender based violence. It offers an enhanced, theoretically more rigorous, 'spatialised' ecological model. The traditional ecological model has been reworked as a multi-dimensional structure, where the layers are (re)conceptualised as simultaneously social and spatial units constructed through and constituted in their connectedness with each other and with elsewhere; with spaces within, through and beyond them. In the new model, the layers are portrayed not as separate from one another, but rather linked together in a single interconnected whole. The ways in which risk factors interconnect with each other and mesh together fashion 'spaces of vulnerability' where violence against women is normalized and legitimated. Cholistan is one such place; a place of intense vulnerability. The 'roots' of gender based violence in Cholistan are deep and entrenched; interconnecting in complex ways to bestow adangerous and devastating legacy on Cholistani women. The thesis adopts a mixed method approach. In total 900 cases of abuse were examined. In addition, 17 interviews were conducted with a variety of key gatekeepers and 25 victim women were interviewed. In total 10 local community leaders were also interviewed in a group forum. The thesis presents evidence of the widespread and persistent abuse of Cholistani women. Violence towards women in Cholistan takes a myriad of forms. some of which are universal, some of which are culturally specific, embedded in the socio-cultural norms and traditions found in this isolated, barren and geographically remote locale. These include factors such as the propensity of exchange marriages, extended family structures, childlessness, son preference, as well as dowry-related issues and poverty; compounded by a lack of functioning state-led judiciary or law enforcement agencies; leaving no avenue of recourse for women These factors interrelate with each other in complex ways and at a variety of scales; to creating a space in Cholistan where violence against women is legitimated, sanctioned and ultimately played out.