Deniz Kandiyoti

SOAS, University of London | SOAS · Department of Development Studies

Deniz Kandiyoti is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her work on gender, development, nationalism, and Islam has been deeply influential within feminist studies, development studies and Middle Eastern studies. Her path-breaking essay ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’ appeared i...

A Turquia é frequentemente apontada como o único país predominantemente muçulmano com constituição laica e com um Código Civil que não obedece à xaria, sendo que o movimento de mulheres obteve vitórias importantes em matéria de reformas jurídicas no início dos anos de 2000. Observa-se, entretanto, um crescente abismo entre direitos formais e direit...

This article attempts to demonstrate that the politics of gender in Turkey is intrinsic rather than incidental to a characterization of its ruling ideology. It does so by focusing on three central nodes of ideology and practice in three domains: first, the use of gender as a central pillar of populism and a marker of difference that pits an authent...

Initially identified with the study of bounded cultures, the anthropological enterprise has become increasingly expansive, extending its reach to diverse manifestations of globalization. This expansive thrust now subsumes the study of phenomena such as neo-liberalism, development, humanitarianism, social movements, new media and cyberspace, popular...

I see this new phase in the history of a well-established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. First, globalization has encouraged grea...

Conflicting claims of Muslim marginalization and injury and alarmist narratives of encroachment on secular spaces and intimidation of its citizens have dominated public debates in Turkey. The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the web of meanings associated with the ‘secular’ and to analyse the political fortunes of secularism. It specifically...

A Tangled Web: Politics of Gender in Turkey Turkey is often singled out as the only Muslim majority country with a secular Constitution and a Civil Code that breaks with the shar’ia, and the women’s movement in Turkey has scored major victories in the realm of legal reforms at the beginning of the years 2000. Nevertheless, there is a widening gap b...

This article explores the ways in which both religion and gender equality are instrumentalised in the service of diverse political agendas. Building on illustrations from Turkey and Afghanistan, the argument is made that a moratorium should be declared on focusing on the binaries of religious vs secular, Western vs non-Western or global vs local in...

This article examines scholarly debates that cast Soviet policies for the emancipation of women in Central Asia as instances of colonial domination, as the modernizing endeavours of a revolutionary state or as combinations of both and takes them to task for overlooking the gendered consequences of the ‘Soviet paradox’. This paradox is evident in th...

This paper argues that gender issues are becoming politicised in novel and counterproductive ways in contexts where armed interventions usher in new blueprints for governance and 'democratisation'. Using illustrations from constitutional and electoral processes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it analyses how the nature of emerging political settlements in...

Incl. abstract and bibl. references This article situates the politics of gender in Afghanistan in the nexus of global and local influences that shape the policy agenda of post-Taliban reconstruction. Three sets of factors that define the parameters of current efforts at securing gender justice are analysed: a troubled history of state-society rela...

This article aims to draw attention to the fact that gender issues are becoming politicised in novel and counterproductive ways in a new geopolitical context where armed interventions usher in blueprints for governance underwritten by international donors and global institutions. These blueprints include efforts at gender mainstreaming, against the...

This article analyses women's participation in life-cycle, religious, and propitiatory rituals in Uzbekistan against the background of the ‘politicization’ of custom under the Soviet regime and fluctuations in official policies towards Islam since the post-Soviet period. Despite changes in official discourse, the resilience of women's rituals may b...

Agrarian reform in Uzbekistan has been informed by contradictory objectives and priorities. Legislation has oscillated between measures to increase private access to land, in line with populist pressures and the structural reform agenda of international agencies, and counter–measures to tighten and restrict such access in response to the Government...

The analysis that follows does not purport to go beyond providing some tentative suggestions concerning the potentialities and limitations of post-coloniality as a concept in the context of the Middle East and Central Asia. Furthermore, it does not pretend to provide a balanced or exhaustive presentation of post-colonial scholarship in the two regi...

While the diffusion of modernity and the spread of development schemes may bring prosperity, optimism and opportunity for some, for others it has brought poverty and a deterioration in quality of life. This book demostrates the crucial importance of looking to ethnography for guidance in shaping development policies. Etnography can show how people'...

Post-Soviet transitions have prompted a search for new policy tools and methods of data collection. The shift from universal welfare provision under the Soviet system to targeted assistance and poverty monitoring has stimulated a new interest in the measurement of living standards and poverty lines. This has promoted the use of quantitative techniq...

In what follows, I will attempt to illustrate the complex ways in which rural households in Andijan province in Uzbekistan are responding to a new configuration of pressures and uncertainties in their environment. In doing so, I hope to show that they are both drawing upon the existing repertoire of routines and relations established during the Sov...

This paper examines the contradictory nature of the ‘modernizing’ encounter between the former Soviet state and Cnetral Asian societies with a view to exploring more fully a path that purported to be transformative in the absence of a market economy. This encounter was evaluated by some as a radical break with the past and by others as an instance...

Introduction 1. Decolonizing Feminism 2. Women in Pre-Colonial Algeria 3. the Colonial War in Fact and Fancy 4. Exposing and Reconstrucing Algerian Identity 5. Reform and Resistance 6. Women's Lived Reality in and Under Colonial Society 7. Nationalism, Decolonization, and Gender 8. State, Socialism, Development and Women 9. Consciousness, Culture,...

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"The most significant theoretical advance in Muslim-world women's studies for years." —Voice Literary Supplement This collection of original essays examines the relationship between Islam, the nature of state projects, and the position of women in the modern nation states of the Middle East and South Asia. Arguing that Islam is not uniform a...

It is commonly conceded that among Muslim nations Turkey distinguishes herself by comprehensive, and as yet unparalleled, reforms with respect to the emancipation of women. These reforms, initiated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, were part of a spate of legislation which amounted to a radical break with Ottoman Islam...

Political projects of modern nation-states, the specificities of their nationalist histories and the positioning of Islam vis-a-vis diverse nationalisms are addressed in this volume with respect to their implications and consequences for women through a series of case studies.

The aim of this paper is to review and evaluate policies directed at rural women in the Third World, as reflected in WID research and policy documents. This review covers the assumptions behind the advocacy of direct assistance to rural women, the goals that are sought in providing such assistance and the means advocated to achieve them. An attempt...

The author explores the effects of agricultural commoditisation on processes of household formation and its impact on age/gender hierarchies within households. Internal and external factors determining the options that households have in organising production and reproduction are examined. Within the context of the Anatolian peasant household, "cla...

In 1987 Turkey was a country offering the perplexing spectacle of a sit-in and hunger strike by ultra-religious women students demanding the right to don the veil to go to classes (a right officially denied), and a small group of feminists marching through the streets to demonstrate against violence against women, virtually in the same week. While...

This article argues that systematic comparative analyses of women's strategies and coping mechanisms lead to a more culturally and temporally grounded understanding of patriarchal systems than the unqualified, abstract notion of patriarchy encountered in contemporary feminist theory. Women strategize within a set of concrete constraints, which I id...

This paper proposes an analysis of the ways in which women and the "woman question" are depicted in the Turkish novel from the Tanzimat period ~ (1839-1876) in the Ottoman empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, after the struggle for national liberation led by Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk. The choice of this particular historical perio...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and critically discuss the effect of social change on rural stratification in Turkey by means of a case study. The rural village under consideration is named Sakarya and is situated 90 kms. S.W. of Ankara in the heart of the grain‐farming area of the Anatolian plateau, which is now dominated by mechanized, cap...