Women in Pakistan’s Federal Administrated Tribal Agencies are probably among the most excluded, invisible and disadvantaged citizens and participants in the country’s public affairs, despite their long struggle and multiple forms of political activism - expressed also in the lack of respective academic studies as well as civil society action research on the issue at hand. The civil society initiative Takra Qabayali Khazay, funded by seven academics, women’s activists and civil society members from the area as well as the province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, aims to organize and support women from FATA to access the public sphere and engage in political participation, despite their continued, (neo-)colonial second class citizenship status, severely obstructing their participation in addition to a rather misogynist gender regime, insisting on gender segregation and women’s predominant confinement to “home affairs”. In this paper, I will thus trace the origin, motivation, agenda, strategies employed by and impact of Takra Qabayali Khazay as well as map multiple forms of FATA women’s political activism based on case studies of TQK members, originating from in-depth interviews conducted in Peshawar and Islamabad in 2014.
