Women and State Power

In this episode

The connection

On a small island in Senegal, the government funds a strict boarding school where the country's brightest girls learn to challenge traditional gender rules. Thousands of miles away, another government uses its authority for the exact opposite purpose. Writing on the five-year anniversary of the Taliban's return, Munera Yousufzada argues that foreign diplomats consistently misread the regime, failing to see that it views state power primarily as a tool to erase women from public life. A sharp contrast emerges when placing this alongside Monika Pronczuk's reporting on the Senegalese academy. It reveals two drastically different ways governments handle patriarchal norms—either funding elite institutions to dismantle them, or using every lever of power to enforce them.

What sticks with you after reading Munera Yousufzada is her blunt assessment of state power. She points out that foreign diplomats keep waiting for the Taliban to act like a normal government. But her piece makes clear that excluding women from schools and jobs isn't a temporary policy or a byproduct of bad governance. For the Taliban, enforcing that strict ideology is the entire point of holding power. Read next to Monika Pronczuk, that use of authority gets flipped completely upside down. Pronczuk takes you to an old French military barracks on an island off the coast of Senegal. Notice how the government in this predominantly Muslim country is using its resources for the exact opposite project. Instead of enforcing traditional rules that tell girls to be seen and not heard, the state actively funds an elite boarding school to train teenagers like Ndeye Awa Diop to defy those expectations. The two writers are looking at entirely different continents, but reading them back-to-back surfaces a sharp contrast. You see what it looks like when a regime uses its absolute authority to erase women from public life, placed right next to a state that decides to pay for their rise to the top.

A piece of official paper can bolt the doors of a university, or it can fund a ferry ride to an island boarding school. What lingers here is how raw state authority has no built-in moral compass. It is just a lever, pulled by whoever happens to sit in the capital. The machinery of government can erase a girl from public life just as easily as it can elevate her. The question left to sit with is this: When basic freedom depends entirely on who holds the state's pen, how do those rights ever become permanent?