'Complex' world of Taliban home: Wife embraces Taliban 'brothers', asserts women's right to freedom

Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Elise Blanchard, award-winning photojournalist and author of “Dans la Maison d’un Taliban” (In the House of a Taliban). Blanchard’s work challenges narratives that reduce Afghan women to passive victims. Drawing on rare access to a Taliban household, she describes a social landscape shaped by profound contradictions. In drought-stricken Badghis province, Blanchard traces child marriage through a chain of material pressures exacerbated by climate change. Gendered violence is explained through the prism of patriarchy, poverty, environmental crisis and political instability.