Afghanistan Peace Campaign 
For generations, authority within the Afghan family rested with its eldest man, the grandfather or, in his absence, the father or oldest brother. They decided everything from marriage and money to migration and disputes and the rest of the household was bound to obey. That arrangement is loosening. AAN’s Sharif Akram has been looking at how decisions, once taken by a single elder, are now shared, argued over and sometimes overturned by the younger, educated and earning male members of the family and, in a more limited way, by women and children. Taking southeastern Afghan society as his case study and drawing on interviews with tribal elders and educated younger men, he considers the nature of authority within the family, what it used to look like and how and why it is changing. He also asks what the change says about the wider transformation of the Afghan countryside.
A family picnics at Qargha Reservoir on the outskirts of Kabul. Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP, 26 October 2021
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The men interviewed for this report described a very different world emerging, one in which younger men are more educated, more mobile and more connected to life beyond the village. They have travelled, possibly worked abroad and encountered new ideas through television, the internet and social media. Many now earn and control their own money. All this has changed not only what they know, but their willingness to question decisions by elders that an earlier generation of young Afghan men would have accepted.
The change can be seen in the everyday decisions families make. One young man ignored his grandfather’s insistence that he study medicine and chose computer science instead. Another rejected his father’s demand that he take a government job, borrowed money from a friend and established a successful business importing solar panels. A father in Paktia recalled how, when he forbade his son, who owned a restaurant in Dubai, from buying a car because the family was already in debt, the son simply bought one anyway. “There was nothing I could do,” the father said, “because he’d earned the money.”
Money may indeed be one of the most important drivers of change. Where sons once handed over everything they earned to the head of the household and depended on him for their needs, the relationship has sometimes been reversed. Fathers may now depend on sons working in Dubai, Saudi Arabia or further afield to support the household. As one interviewee put it: “If you have money, you have power.” Education and knowledge matter too, though. The world is a different place from when there was little travel outside the village. Now, in dealing with businesses, government offices and a monied economy, older men may know less well than their sons and grandsons.
The elders, however, have not been completely sidelined. Their judgement still carries particular weight on questions of land, lineage and custom, where experience and accumulated knowledge count. Some elders have also adapted, bringing educated and earning younger men into discussions and listening to their points of view. What is emerging is less a transfer of authority from old to young than a division of it, with different family members carrying weight on different matters. At the same time, the ground on which authority rests is changing – from age and seniority to schooling, knowledge and earning power, from a position a man is given to one he increasingly has to win.
The consequences extend beyond who gets the final say. Elders were more likely to dwell on what had been lost: families are less united, disputes are harder to settle and young men are increasingly inclined to consider themselves their own masters. Even payghor, the public shame that once helped enforce obedience, has lost some of its power because defiance has become too commonplace to mark one household out from another. Younger interviewees saw gains in their ability to question decisions they considered wrong or unjust, including marriages imposed on young people and customs that harmed women and children. Yet, as one interviewee said of the young, who now manage everything for themselves, the change brings a measure of freedom but also a loss they cannot name.
The changes within the family also point to a wider transformation in the Afghan countryside. Land, which for generations was at the centre of Pashtun family life and a foundation of household identity, livelihoods and standing, has lost some of its weight relative to the salaries, businesses and remittances increasingly controlled by younger men. As the economic foundations of the old order have shifted, so too have the relationships and mutual obligations built around them. The result is greater room for individual choice and independence, but also less certainty that family members will act together.
Where this leads is not yet clear. It may settle into a new balance in which the experience of elders and the knowledge and earning power of younger generations complement each other. Or the dispersal of authority may contribute to the weakening of the family and collective life that many of the older interviewees fear. Either way, the fading of one man’s unquestioned rule offers a window onto something larger: a rural society in which inherited duties and hierarchies increasingly have to contend with individual judgement, economic independence and choice.
Edited by Kate Clark and Fabrizio Foschini
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