Jun 11th, 2009 by admin
cmann@femaid.org
I am a Franco-British social anthropologist and art historian writer and novelist. I specialize on Gender and Armed Conflict, from a historical point of view, but especially on Bosnia and more than anything Afghanistan.
I teach art history to students from US universities and sociology to French students. I started the first seminars in Paris on War and Gender and am currently planning one in conjunction with Amnesty International via my academic association www.womeninwar.org. I am organizing the first-ever academic conference on Women in Afghanistan on April 24th 2010 at AUP in Paris
Since 1993, I have been involved with aid projects in war zones. I started in Bosnia, during the war, starting an NGO called Enfants de Bosnie. With a grass-roots women’s group in Sarajevo, we organized convoys and aid and rebuilt the Osnova Skola Skender Kulenovic, a beautiful primary school in the suburb of Dobrinja, in Sarajevo. At the time, i wanted to understand what I was experiencing, so I went back to university, and got a PhD in sociology, in the field of women and war. In 1999, one year after the school was inaugurated, I realized I wanted to go on doing aid projects and researching, so I moved on to Pakistan, then Afghanistan. It seemed to me then the Taliban were the worst scourge of womankind but that no-one was paying much attention- until 9/11. So then I started FemAid (www.femaid.org) and there has been no looking back since then…In November 2009, we inaugurated the first-ever centre for women and children in Farah, a particularly difficult province of Afghanistan, situated near the Iranian border http://femaid.org/Farahcentre.html. Aid projects (working strictly with women’s grass-roots organizations) and academic research go together in my life, feeding from each other.
I write regularly on the subject in English and French. My most recent articles have been posted in the international press:Vu d’une province d’Afghanistan: Des zones rurales exclues de la vie politique ?
L’Humanité, November 16th 2009? http://www.humanite.fr/article2755367,2755367
Entrevue avec Sayeda Mojgan Mostafavi, vice-ministre des Affaires féminines en l’Afghanistan
Droit coutumier et corruption : des obstacles aux droits des femmes afghanes , Sysiphe, Montral, November 23rd 2009
http://sisyphe.org/spip.php?article3440
Japan Times (January 4th 2010) and Guardian (London)
The law’s the problem in Afghanistan
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100104a1.html+ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/26/afghanistan-women-customary-law?showallcomments=true#start-of-comments
Femmes afghanes : un échec partagé http://www.liberation.fr/monde/0101613405-femmes-afghanes-un-echec-partage
http://www.humanite.fr/article2755367,2755367
www.sisyphe.org/spip.php?article344A
Les Talibans déjà au pouvoir à Kaboul
http://sisyphe.org/spip.php?article3502
Older, but my main interest:
A death sentence for women, the Guardian November 7th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/07/afghanistan-gender(distributed by Project Syndicate, distributed worldwide)