Mounira M. Charrad

University of Texas at Austin | UT

The volume serves as reference point for anyone interested in the Middle East and North Africa as well as for those interested in women's rights and family law, generally or in the MENA region. It is the only book covering personal status codes of nearly a dozen countries. It covers Muslim family law in the following Middle East/north African count...

In this photo essay, the authors examined over 3,500 photos of the early phase of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, to capture the meanings that protestors brought to the fore.

The 2004 reforms of Islamic family law in Morocco brought about a long-awaited expansion of women’s rights. The Moroccan women’s movement was a key player in the promulgation of the reforms. We highlight the role of professional women leaders in the movement and show how they developed political capital and the “power of presence” by combining (i)...

Coming as a surprise to most observers and following the self‐immolation of a street vendor in a remote town of central Tunisia, the Jasmine Revolution of 2010–2011, the first uprising of the Arab Spring, has often been seen as a success story for digital communication through widespread use of social media. We suggest that this applied to the late...

The Arab Spring has inaugurated a new form of politics that represents a shift from a 'politics from above' to a 'politics from below' in regard to gender policy in Tunisia. Discourse surrounding state policy on gender, formerly the purview of elite groups, has recently been shaped and driven by popular organisations and associations. This article...

Citizenship means belonging to a community defined in political terms and nation-states have historically constituted the most relevant political community. A matter of inclusion and exclusion, citizenship can be understood as involving rights and obligations as codified in the laws and regulations of a country. It can also be seen in its more symb...

Mounira (Maya) Charrad is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas in Austin and non-resident Fellow at the Baker Institute, Rice University. Her book, States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, won several national awards, including the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociologi...

This Presentation starts by noting that, relative to other countries in the Arab world, Tunisia has the most progressive and women-friendly set of laws, including the 2014 Constitution and family law. Tunisian family law grants women greater rights in marriage and divorce than the laws of other Arab countries. Promulgated in the aftermath of the Ar...

This Presentation starts by noting that, relative to other countries in the Arab world, Tunisia has the most progressive and women-friendly set of laws, including the 2014 Constitution and family law. Tunisian family law grants women greater rights in marriage and divorce than the laws of other Arab countries. Promulgated in the aftermath of the Ar...

Mounira (Maya) Charrad is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas in Austin and non-resident Fellow at the Baker Institute, Rice University. Her book, States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, won several national awards, including the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociologi...

This essay discusses the major trends in the study of gender, religion, and state in the Middle East from colonialism to the Arab Spring. Showing how the field started as a critique of colonial representations of women in the Middle East as passive and subordinate, it reviews briefly the foundational studies. It then indicates the major frameworks...

The article shows that the concept of patrimonialism is useful for the analysis not only of nation-states, but also of local and imperial power structures. Highlighting the limits of empires, we consider how local conditions shaped the strategies of colonial states in the process of empire building. We argue that the strength of local patrimonial n...

The Arab Spring has inaugurated a new form of politics that represents a shift from a ‘politics from above’ to a ‘politics from below’ in regard to gender policy in Tunisia. Discourse surrounding state policy on gender, formerly the purview of elite groups, has recently been shaped and driven by popular organisations and associations. This article...

The scholarship on gender in the Middle East takes two objectives as its mandate: first, to dismantle the stereotype of passive and powerless Muslim women and, second, to challenge the notion that Islam shapes women's condition in the same way in all places. The urgency of this endeavor is heightened by the fact that gender has come to demarcate ba...

How useful is the concept of patrimonialism to analyze state formation and political dynamics in postcolonial nation-states? Using Tunisia, Morocco, and Iraq during critical periods of state-building following the end of colonial rule, the author considers this question. The purpose of the article is to build on Max Weber by exploring how patrimoni...

The authors in this special issue discuss how women's voices are excluded, silenced and marginalized in settings and processes such as war, displacement, democratization, labor market, judicial system, state bureaucracy, nonprofit organizations and national debates on citizenship. They also discover how women found their voices, channeled them, mod...

Mounira M. Charrad is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas in Austin. Her book, States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco won the Distinguished Award for the Best Book in Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the Best Book on Politics and History Greenstone Award fr...

The book focuses on the Netherlands as a distinctive case which, as the first hegemonic economic and political entity in Western Europe, sheds light on similar processes but different outcomes in France and England. The time periods considered are the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century when the Dutch established a position of world power through...

Debates over gender relevant legislation such as family law have led to serious conflict in many periods of Middle Eastern history, especially in recent times. One way to understand the intensity of the current debates is to recognize that gender issues raise fundamental questions about the relationship between individual and society and the role o...

List of Maps and Tables Preface Acknowledgments Note on Foreign Terms and Transliteration Introduction PART ONE: Similarities: Common Heritage of the Maghrib 1. State Formation in Kin-Based Societies 2. Islam and Family Law: An Unorthodox View 3. Women Ally with the Devil: Gender, Unity, and Division 4. Men Work with Angels: Power of the Tribe PART...

This paper offers a macropolitical framework to analyze shifts in the gender policy of the Tunisian state. Throughout the twentieth century, the status of women in Tunisia has been caught up in political wars fought largely over other issues such as colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and Islamic cultural authenticity. Only in the 1990s did women'...

Political elites in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have made different choices in regard to family law and women's rights, depending on how their own interests are served by strengthening or undermining kin-based communities. In Tunisia, the state has not relied on kin based communities for support: traditional structures have disintegrated with admi...

Starting in the 1950s and ever since, Tunisia has implemented gender legislation expanding women's rights in family law. The ground breaking phase occurred with the promulgation of the Code of Personal Status in the mid-1950s during the formation of a national state in the aftermath of independence from French colonial rule. Another major phase occ...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1980. Microfilm.