This August marks five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and instituted a systematic regime of domination and oppression of women and girls. Their repression has only widened and deepened since then, as they have issued more than 100 edicts separating and segmenting women and girls from the rest of society and fundamentally subordinating them in public and political life. Women are banned from secondary and university education; from holding public or political office; from parks, baths, and gyms; from being treated by male doctors; from renewing their law licenses; from leaving their homes without male chaperones; and from speaking or showing their faces outside of their homes.
In March 2023, leading Afghan and Iranian human rights activists proposed a solution to address this dire situation: they launched the #EndGenderApartheid campaign and called for “the global recognition of the crime of gender apartheid.” Prominent politicians including Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown, Nobel Laureates such as Malala Yousafzai and Shirin Ebadi, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan have all called for the Taliban’s actions to be labeled “gender apartheid.”
There are at least two theories of success for this strategy. First, as Karima Bennoune argued in Just Security, labeling behavior as apartheid has “symbolic and expressive importance” and can enhance “the mobilization of shame.” For example, it can help mobilize mass social movements of resistance akin to the South African anti-apartheid movements during the 1970s and 1980s. The logic being that the term apartheid is evocative and conveys a greater severity and scope of abuses than alternative language such as persecution or discrimination. Second, codifying gender apartheid as illegal under international law may also spur publics and elites to take greater action due to formal obligation and a belief in law’s legitimacy. Today, only racial apartheid and gender persecution are classified as crimes against humanity.
In research for a new peer-reviewed study published in International Affairs, we tested these arguments through a public opinion survey experiment of 1,200 U.S. citizens and a sample of 100 U.S. elites from academia, government, and NGOs. We found that law is more powerful than language. American support for policies helping women and girls in Afghanistan increased when the Taliban’s conduct was described as illegal, but there was little change when it was labeled “gender apartheid” versus alternatives such as “gender persecution.” These findings can help shape an optimal strategy for assisting Afghan women and girls as they continue to live under Taliban oppression.
The Limited Impact of Gender Apartheid as a Label
The rationale for why gender apartheid is a particularly powerful label is that it describes an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination. This distinguishes it from policies such as gender persecution, which, while also malign, connotes violations that are narrower and less severe. As a result, the organizers of the #EndGenderApartheid campaign argue that “the word ‘apartheid’ itself carries significant gravitas,” similar to the term genocide.
We know from prior research that subtle differences in language can sometimes affect public opinion. In our study, however, we found no evidence that the gender apartheid label had that power.
We presented respondents with a mock news article (based on real facts) about the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan. While every participant received identical information about how women and girls were being repressed, we randomly varied whether this behavior was labeled by U.N. experts as “gender apartheid” or “gender persecution.” We then asked respondents about their willingness to support a range of policies that might ameliorate the suffering—from sanctions and military intervention to foreign aid and immigration.
We found that whether the Afghan government’s actions were framed as gender apartheid or gender persecution did not matter. This was particularly striking because two of our analyses were relatively easy tests for finding such effects. For one subset of respondents, we included background information about the meaning of apartheid and its historical origins in South Africa. Thus, it was not a lack of knowledge or context about apartheid that explained the label’s lack of effect. Furthermore, one might expect a sample of self-identified left-leaning elites to find the accusation of apartheid particularly concerning, but again the label “gender apartheid” did not elicit different policy preferences compared to gender persecution.
This outcome may be explained by the fact that the language difference between gender apartheid and gender persecution is subtle. Both terms indicate that the perpetrator is committing a serious violation of human rights, and respondents did not make a significant distinction between the two terms. There was simply no clear consensus among respondents that gender apartheid was a more severe transgression than gender persecution. Our results mirror those of other studies, which also found that labels like “genocide” have little effect in spurring policy action compared to alternative terms such as mass killing.
The Power of Gender Apartheid as a Crime
Apartheid is criminalized under international law in both the 1973 Apartheid Convention and as a crime against humanity in the 1998 Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. Though they use slightly different definitions, both treaties define apartheid as systematic oppression based solely on race. Thus, gender apartheid is not currently illegal under international law (although gender persecution is illegal as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute). A key aim of the #EndGenderApartheid campaign is, therefore, to codify gender apartheid as an international crime.
Our study suggests this is a more promising pathway to pursue, and it could eventually help shift public opinion. Although the label of gender apartheid alone is unlikely to motivate the public to act differently, we found strong evidence that information about international law violations remains powerful.
Informing respondents that apartheid is illegal under international law (a true statement, though only in the case of racial apartheid) increased support for policies to help Afghan women and girls by about 10 percentage points compared to when respondents were told that gender apartheid is technically not illegal under international law. On average, policies received majority support (53 percent) when respondents were informed apartheid was illegal, but less than majority support (43 percent) when they were told gender apartheid is technically not illegal.
However, public willingness to help was identical (53 percent) for respondents who were informed that gender persecution is illegal under international law and those told that apartheid is illegal. This indicates that accusations of gender apartheid are likely to be more resonant if the crime is codified under international law in the future, but available alternatives like gender persecution that are already illegal might be similarly effective.
A Strategy for Progress
Our findings do not suggest that using the term gender apartheid is harmful, or that it does not more accurately describe the current conditions in Afghanistan than alternatives such as gender persecution or gender discrimination. Rather, they indicate that advocates should be cautious about the amount of work “apartheid” may be able to do to move policy preferences, at least among the American public.
A key implication from our study is that law matters more than labels when it comes to public opinion. Information that the treatment of women and girls violated international law galvanized the public more than the language of gender apartheid. This implies that efforts to codify gender apartheid as illegal under international law through the draft articles for a crimes against humanity treaty, currently under deliberation at the U.N., may be a fruitful avenue to pursue.
The International Criminal Court’s 2025 conviction of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (a senior leader of the Janjaweed militia in Darfur, Sudan) for crimes against humanity and war crimes reinforces the potential of these efforts. Gender-based persecution was one of the crimes he was found guilty of, the first such conviction at the Court. Furthermore, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban officials for the crime against humanity of gender persecution.
In addition to legal codification of gender apartheid, knowledge about the existence of abuses and their details may be more important to the public than what the abuses are called. More can be done to raise awareness about the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan, including the systematic and widespread nature of the Taliban’s repression. As these severe human rights violations continue—unchecked—such efforts are urgent and essential.
