Ambiguous progress and evident disasters: women on the bench in Afghanistan

This article aims to contribute to scholarship on gender representation in the judiciary. While an increase in female judges has generally been considered beneficial to women in terms of representation and outcomes, I argue that the case of Afghanistan during the 2001–21 period shows that boosting the number of female judges can both challenge and reinforce ideals of female seclusion. The latter happens when expectations that female judges should deal with ‘women’s issues’ form part of the impetus for promoting their appointments, thus facilitating prescriptions of gendered propriety rather than a more gender-equal judiciary. The article argues that this paradox illustrates the importance of seeing women’s symbolic, descriptive and substantive representation as co-constitutive. The meaning of women’s presence in the judiciary shapes their access to positions within it, even if, as the case of Afghanistan also shows, this dynamic is far from unequivocal or linear.