The Taliban's return to power in August 2021 posed a serious crisis for Afghan women, incorporating a systemic dismantling of a 20 year legacy and a full-on gender-segregated society where formal education was banned for girls and women. This piece takes the analysis away from a position of victimhood to one of agency showing how Afghan women—both inside the country, and exilic circumstances are continuously, fully engaged in an everyday, sustained, intellectual, digital and social resistance to that erasure.

Drawing on Paulo Freire's concept of "education as liberation," and feminist theories of agency in conditions of oppression, I claims that the women's fight for knowledge has re-conceptualized learning as a political act of resistance, and a morla act of survival. The research applies a qualitative and interpretive lens, through the analysis of reports and testimonies, and data emerging (2022-2025) about digital education networks.

The research underlines the nascent emergence of decentralized, flexible, and closed online learning communities (as seen in examples such as the Woman Online University and haphazard Telegram groups) which provide culture circles for the development of critical consciousness. The digital underground is not an informal education, but a self-organized, ethical, and intellectual scaffold, or collective "sisterhood of learning."

The article extends the critique of the top-down and project-based model of global organizations attuned to detecting capabilities that often overlooks the political and non-economic soul of such resistance, and needs to reaffirm solidarity versus charity. Ultimately, the resistance of Afghan women to get back into learning transcends contemporary understandings of freedom—a movement of learning that converts silence into voice, exile into exchange, rupture into the architecture of resilient futures.

Education Under Silence

Following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Afghan women found themselves once again at the center of a humanitarian, political, and moral crisis. Within a matter of months, girls were barred from secondary and higher education, women were removed from most public jobs, and reestablished rules around dress and movement ethics were put into place. This systematic exclusion undermined two decades of progress in social and educational spaces for women and constructed one of the most gender-segregated countries in the world today (UN Women, 2023; Human Rights Watch, 2024). Afghanistan became a nation where silence was institutionalized, and women being visible became a form of resistance in itself.

However, amid this rigorously enforced silence, Afghan women — both inside Afghanistan and in other countries — refuse to succumb to invisibility. From clandestine study circles in Kabul to online learning around the world, they continue to push against erasure through acts of intellectual, digital, and social resistance (Amnesty International, 2025). Education was previously an act of empowerment, and now it is an act of political resistance and moral survival. This leads to an important question: When formal education is prohibited, where do we learn?

The present article examines the ways in which Afghan women maintain their engagement with education and civic engagement in informal and virtual settings, despite the systemic repression of educational access. The women’s struggles for access to knowledge indicate that education is not simply a site of learning, but also a site of resistance and self-preservation (Tolo News Analysis, 2025). The important turn in this research is to shift the narrative of victimhood to agency, documenting how women became producers and transmitters of knowledge under an authoritarian regime.

To be sure, international analyses of Afghanistan have focused on humanitarian crises, diplomatic isolation, or counterterrorism, concluding that very little work has focused specifically on the intellectual and pedagogical functions of women’s resistance. This research aims to address these gaps by examining the ways in which women have sustained their education through online study networks, informal study groups, and transnational digital communities to sustain continuity of educational practice and, ultimately, collective memory. Afghan women's digital engagement ultimately becomes a form of "everyday politics," where learning becomes both a form of survival and protest.

This analysis is framed within Paulo Freire’s notion of “education as a form of liberation” (Freire, 1970), which suggests education is a life-long process of critical consciousness that frees individuals to contest systems of oppression. This is supported by a feminist understanding of agency under oppression (Mahmood, 2005) wherein resistance can take the form of invisible, everyday actions. Together, these perspectives provide insights into how Afghan women reconstitute the search for knowledge as an ethical and political form of freedom.

From a methodological standpoint, this qualitative and interpretive analysis combines reports by UNESCO, UNAMA, and Human Rights Watch (2022-2025), with digital ethnography of women’s online education spaces (UNESCO, 2024; Afghan Women’s Network), with first-hand testimonies and narratives documented through global media and NGOs, and through online learning. Collectively, the study provides an in-depth and more nuanced understanding of how education operates as both a personal and collective act of resistance.

Ultimately, the paper argues that the persistence of Afghan women in reclaiming knowledge represents not only a fight for individual rights but also a redefinition of freedom itself—transforming education from a privilege into an act of resistance.

Digital Resistance and Online Learning

While the Taliban's decision in 2021 to deny Afghan women access to universities and schools did not eliminate education, it did provoke moments of transformational learning. Young Afghan girls began to harness their laptops and phones in the quiet of their homes and small rooms around the country into instruments of resistance. In both the absence of institutions and their freedom, learning itself was an act of survival and civic resistance (UNESCO, 2023).

Coursera and EdX acknowledged more than double the enrollment in online courses among Afghan learners in comparison to pre-2021 (UNESCO, 2025). Of all the solutions, the Woman Online University stands out. Founded by Afghan educators in exile, the Woman Online University provides free online university education for Afghan girls inside Afghanistan. Course offerings include management, social sciences, and information technology (Woman Online University, 2024), underpinned by a straightforward, yet powerful, belief: knowledge can run in the dark.

Additional study circles have developed on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet among volunteers who have formed these self-organized learning networks. Many of girls who have lost formal education are now engaged in some sort of digital or informal education. These are not classrooms. They are small intellectual communities where women support each other, share learning resources, and escape the isolation of the societal oppression. Importantly, these digital classrooms are clandestine culture circles (Freire, 1970/2018) where women recognize their oppression, reflect upon it together, and in turn develop the critical consciousness to act as agents of their, not subjects of their history.

Many of these online classes are reported to take place semi-clandestinely (Human Rights Watch, 2024), and represent collective resistance and the quiet persistence of women’s intellect. From these spaces, a new voice emerged that is a language of knowledge that refuses to be tied to geography or censorship.

In the end, digital education has transformed from a replacement for traditional schooling into a form of civic and cultural resistance. Every remote lesson, every recording of lectures, and every late-night conversation is an act of rebellion—a statement that Afghan women will not be able to be erased from the global community of thinkers. In their silence, they are still speaking the language of knowledge.

 Women as Knowledge Builders

Each online class carries unheard stories of bravery. Afghan women—students, teachers, and volunteers—have created a movement of intellectual solidarity through digital education. Inside their living rooms and bedrooms, and in secret spaces to study, they keep reading, writing, and debating, transforming their resilience, individually, into a shared project of knowledge reconstruction.

In interviews and online testimonies collected by UN Women (2025), many Afghan female students recall how learning online became their lifeline. For example, one student from Herat said, “When my university closed, my house became my classroom. My phone became my window to the world.” Each of those fateful change podiums is representative of much more than perseverance; the gradual metamorphosing is re-creation of an intellectual community in the face of oppression.

Similarly, a transformation has also occurred with the roles of educators. For example, female professors have mentored students remotely online, through applications such as Google Meet, Telegram and Woman Online University. Most of these self-identified women now reside in exile in other regional countries including Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, however they continue to teach willingly (UN Women, 2023).

In these informal networks, a “sisterhood of learning” developed. What began as a temporary exile response to Taliban decrees has developed into a transnational community of educators and learners. Women share Google docs, join virtual reading groups, create Telegram discussion forums, or develop shared projects collaboratively on topics ranging from research papers to learning a language and community projects. The act of solidarity, for most Afghan students and educators, has taken precedence, crossing geographic, political, and sociocultural boundaries, and replacing institutional organization and structure with emotional and intellectual trust (Amnesty International, 2024).

Such phenomena challenge assumptions of what education can be or has to be, unbound from institutionalized or state-facilitated structures. Although Afghan women have continued to educate, they have done so by developing decentralized micro-universities based on trust, empathy, and institutionalized autonomy. Political scientist Deniz Kandiyoti (2022) surmises, “Women under authoritarian regimes often produce alternative moral economies of resistance”. The case of Afghan women's education demonstrates this vividly; instead, education has occurred not just as an act of self-development, but as a moral act of resistance to exclusion.

Therefore, these women are not merely consumers of education, but creators of a new epistemology. They reclaim learning as a collective, feminist, and political act. With each online session, they are rewriting the definitions of being educated, free, and seen.

The Digital Underground and the Silence of Global Institutions

Beyond fear and bans lies another world—a hidden, digital, and feminine world. Within this underground of cyberspace, virtual classrooms, and locked chats, Afghan women have redefined education. University doors may be locked, but women gather every day in WhatsApp groups, Telegram, and Google Meets to learn, read, write, and breath together. They form informal collectives that are self-organized and fluid, unregistered, yet in their very dis-order is tremendous moral and political strength.

 This digital underground was created by Afghan women, not international organizations. When organizations like UNESCO or UN Women talk about empowerment and hope with their programs—every step of the way be-ing subject to bureaucratic procedures, funds made from donations and a top-down, ‘project-based’ logic— really is not support. Their annual reports will include, for example, that they “support education for Afghan women” when, really, the support comes from anonymous volunteers, or teachers impacted by exile, or students who risk everything to keep classrooms going in and out of fragile internet connections and determination.

In many online discourses, women lament the lack of direct interaction. As one exiled lecturer commented: “We don’t need funding; we need trust. These organizations do not understand that our learning is political and not project-based.” This assertion is consistent with Chandra Mohanty’s (2003) pointed remark that when the Global North translates the struggles of women in the South into development projects, it “robs their resistance of its political soul.” Meanwhile, Afghan women are developing new grammars of freedom through digital learning practices, such as the Woman Online University and countless informal study circles and Telegram classrooms into a parallel academic world, without licenses, without budgets, but with a fierce conviction that knowledge is liberation. Each online class is a political act, and every shared PDF is an act of rebellion. Education — in this case — is not in the form of a traditional curricular subject, but rather an ethics and collective infrastructure for survival. Afghan women continue to reimagine themselves and their futures through learning — in exile, in anonymity, and in hope.

The digital underground created by Afghan women, in defiance of local oppression and global oblivion, provides a radical reimagining of resilience. It shows the world that the future of education is not in conference rooms or policy papers but within the glowing screens of displaced teachers, and within the quiet determination of the women who will not forget how to learn.

The Future of Education and the Resistance of Afghan Women

The narrative of women's education under Taliban rule involves more than silencing; it tells a tale of resiliency and re-creation of education. In the grip of prohibition and censorship, Afghan women have altered the very meaning of education—not as a privilege, but as a communal act of survival and freedom. The online classes, volunteer workshops, and transnational learning networks that have sprung up since 2021 are not stopgap measures for universities but the introduction of a new philosophy of education founded on community, creativity, and self-determination.

Ultimately, the current crisis in Afghanistan has demonstrated a profound truth: education cannot be destroyed—it can only be transformed. When school gates are locked, education finds shelter—in homes, in phones, in encrypted spaces. This movement of knowledge, supported by the agency of women, embodies what Paulo Freire once called “education as liberation.” Every online seminar, reading circle, or language lesson taught by Afghan women shows not just an element of academic pursuit, but also an ethical resistance to erasure.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of education in Afghanistan must not rely solely on access to digital networks. Trust, safety, and recognition are fundamental to its foundation—none of which technology is capable of providing. There must be a concerted effort by local communities, refugee educators, and international allies to ensure that Afghan women are not framed solely as beneficiaries of aid, but as knowledgeable collaborators. As Kabeer (2024), states 'Empowerment does not begin with a gift of opportunity, but with the capacity to define possibilities for oneself.'

We already have inspiring examples that provide the most direct glimpse into that future. The Online University for Women is providing access to hundreds of Afghan students around the world, and collaborative academic projects of Afghan and global scholars are creating new opportunities for higher education. Together, these forms of networks offer hints at how to imagine and deliver a more postcolonial and inclusive educational ecosystem—one that values lived experience as much as academic credentials.

Nevertheless, the global community must ask itself a difficult but serious question: will it support Afghan women beyond the headlines? While the world's gaze is often temporary, the battle for knowledge is eternal. The future of learning is not just a technology question or an infrastructure question; it is a question of the world's moral commitment to protect intellectual freedom where it is in greatest peril. 

Today, Afghan women remind us that learning remains an unbreakable act of hope, even with no campus or credentials. Their resistance turns silence into voice, exile into exchange, and despair into the design of a new future. The future of learning—if the world truly hears—speaks in their voices. 

Conclusion:

The struggle of Afghan women for access to education has become one of the most impactful forms of intellectual and moral resistance of the twenty-first century. In a moment of erasure, they not only protect the right to learn but have also redefined what education means under oppression. Specifically, learning, for many Afghan women, is no longer simply a path to social mobility; it has become a frame for political survival, spiritual resistance, and collective memory.

This change in education into resistance has far-reaching implications for the global understanding of freedom. The women teaching, learning, and organizing in digital space are not simply victims of oppression—they are builders of alternative futures. Their classrooms - often constructed out of smartphones, slow internet, and unyielding will - teach us something that global institutions consistently miss: liberation happens in the mind long before it is articulated in plate glass.

The task of global educational actors is to provide space, but also to listen, to learn and to stand next to Afghan women as co-equals in the intellectual project to remake their country. Support cannot just be about charity, but it must be solidarity - solidarity that sees women as producers of knowledge that is coming from a pedagogy of struggle, empathy and hope.

For Afghan women living in exile, the links between generations form not only between people in Afghanistan and those who migrated to other countries for varying reasons, but also between those women who fled from Afghanistan and have the courage to create online classrooms as an archive, as courage, and as a connection to the people they may never encounter face-to-face. These online classrooms, in addition to developing connections, also stand as examples of the continuing educational journeys of Afghan women, reminding all of us there is no confiscating education because it will migrate, mutate, and reclaim itself wherever the desire to know-how lives.

The future of learning in exile is not only the future of Afghanistan—it is a vision for former and future societies resisting oppression. These voices compel us to think differently of global learning, not as lead by peace, but as rights defended in resistance. The voices of Afghan women in and out of Afghanistan shed light on the path to freer world, and humane world, where learning may perhaps become the vocabulary for survival.