Is the needle mightier than the sword? Reframing women's craft as political agency in conflict zones

Abstract

Historically associated with domesticity, femininity and care, embroidery has rarely been recognised as a form of political action. This thesis argues, however, that women’s textile practices can constitute significant forms of human rights advocacy, particularly where access to public speech, formal employment and collective organisation is restricted. Centred on the question of the conditions under which women’s textile practices can constitute forms of human rights advocacy, the study develops the concept of craft-based human rights advocacy to describe practices that communicate harm, preserve threatened knowledge, sustain collective capacity and assert claims to dignity and recognition. Adopting a qualitative comparative case study approach, the thesis examines three distinct textile traditions. Chilean arpilleras transformed fabric scraps into visual testimonies of disappearance, repression and economic deprivation under the Pinochet dictatorship. Afghan khamak preserves technical knowledge, social relationships and limited economic possibilities under conditions of severe restrictions on women’s education, employment, mobility and public participation. Palestinian tatreez functions as a portable archive of memory, identity and relationships with place across displacement and diaspora. The analysis considers five interconnected dimensions: textiles as testimony and archive, craft as labour and economic survival, mediation by institutions and markets, international and digital circulation, and the structural limitations of craft as a political practice. Bringing feminist craft scholarship into dialogue with memory studies, feminist economics and cultural rights, the thesis demonstrates that the political significance of embroidery does not reside in the stitch alone, but in the relationships of production, meaning and circulation that surround it. It concludes that craft cannot replace legal or structural transformation, but can give material endurance to experiences, identities and memories that political power attempts to silence.