Marriage, Taliban Rule, Norms and Women’s Empowerment in Afghanistan

Abstract The Taliban have devastated the rights of women in Afghanistan by limiting their ability to participate in society, potentially causing permanent harm to women’s autonomy within their own marriages. We posit that women married during the Taliban rule may see reduced autonomy based on changes in gender norms from Taliban policy. We estimate the effect of being married during various levels of Taliban rule in 2002, 2009, and 2012 on outcomes in 2015. We use variation in the Taliban’s control in a province at the time of marriage to estimate the effects of norms at the time of a marriage on outcomes measured in 2015. We find that women’s decision-making power was higher in 2015 for those who married when their province was not under Taliban control, but surprisingly, their experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) also increased, suggesting that intrahousehold conflicts potentially increased from regime changes. We link these results to a previous literature that suggests that retaliatory IPV may occur as women gain more power and lower their fertility, with the finding that when the Taliban lost control, fertility fell substantially. These results suggest potential policies that address the long-term negative impacts of the Taliban rule on women’s autonomy should the regime lose power again, with special attention given to potential increases in IPV.