Valentine M. Moghadam

• Northestern University, Boston, Mass., USA

That women’s labor force participation in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been consistently low is well known, but explanations vary as to the principal causes. Moreover, many studies examine the female economically active population in aggregate, without sociodemographic distinctions. The puzzle is why women remain under-represented in Iran’s lab...

This study empirically investigates the link between militarization and women's labor force participation rate, and gender inequality. Applying a panel cointegration method for 74 countries for 1990–2017, the study demonstrates the impact of militarization for different country groups, showing a significant negative association between indicators o...

Scholars have long established that institutions, both formal and informal, are gendered. But how does institutional change come about, and what prevents it? This article focuses on the debate in Tunisia around equal inheritance for women. Tunisia’s 1956 family law had emancipatory features, but equal inheritance for daughters was not among them, a...

Feminist scholars have long argued that militarism and patriarchy are linked. To date, however, the relationship between militarization and gender inequality has not been empirically tested. Using the Gender Inequality Index and the Global Militarization Index for the period of 1990–2017 for 133 countries, we put the spotlight on militarization to...

The chapter poses several questions about the gendered nature of the interstate system, the relationship between the arms trade and conflict, and the connection between militarism and patriarchy, gender inequality, and hyper-masculinities. After surveying some of the key contributions made by feminist scholars and activists to the understanding of...

Informed by sociological standpoint, intersectional, and gender regime theories, we examine perceptions of a diverse sample of Iranian Kurdish women in the city of Sanandaj about their legal status and social positions. We find perceptions of injustice, oppression, male control, and lack of opportunity associated with both the family and broader so...

The chapter focuses on the role of civil society as a determining factor in the Arab Spring uprisings and their outcomes in the seven country case studies. It begins by revisiting the literature on, and debates over, civil society and its relationship to the state and political change, distilling two approaches. In one, civil society is a separate...

The Middle East and North Africa region has not been immune to forms of contentious politics, having experienced independence struggles, revolutions, labor protests, and demonstrations for women’s rights. Yet it was not part of democracy’s third wave, which enveloped Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of southeast Asia and su...

The chapter elucidates the book’s gender variable. It provides details for each country to show not only how women were affected by the Arab Spring protests, but more significantly, how gender relations and women’s mobilizations shaped the nature of the protests and the aftermath. It begins with a synopsis of feminist studies on women’s movement or...

The book argues that the success or failure of prodemocracy social movements is inextricably linked to the regional and international external environment of states undergoing transitions from authoritarian rule. The seven country cases all have experienced both coercive and noncoercive forms of external influence by regional and international acto...

The chapter examines macro- and meso-level variation in the institutional and structural conditions that galvanized popular mobilization, it and maps their trajectory a decade following the uprisings. Although the protests were a culmination of an enduring struggle for political liberalization and democratization, years of stalled growth and high u...

This introductory chapter poses the book’s main questions, surveys the literature on the Arab Spring, places the Arab Spring in historical and comparative perspectives, introduces the book’s explanatory framework and methodology, and provides an overview of the book. Of the countries involved in and affected by the Arab Spring protests, why was Tun...

Why were some, but not all the Arab mass social protests of 2011 accompanied by relatively quick and nonviolent outcomes in the direction of regime change, democracy, and social transformation? Why was a democratic transition limited to Tunisia, and why did region-wide democratization not occur? After the Arab Uprisings offers an explanatory framew...

This final chapter reiterates the book’s explanatory framework and overarching thesis. We have argued for an integrated and holistic explanatory framework that accounts for structural and societal factors and external and internal forces: the state and political institutions, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and internatio...

This contribution draws on world-system, Marxist, and feminist theories to argue that globalization is a stage in the evolution of the capitalist world-system, with distinct geographic, class, and gender features. Although there is some merit in redefining ‘globalization’ to enable its extension back to ancient history, this contribution situates ‘...

Applying Walby’s model of gender regime, with some modifications, to the Middle East and North Africa, I highlight the importance of the family as an institutional domain, replace the ideal types of social-democratic and neoliberal public gender regimes with neopatriarchal and conservative-corporatist, and elucidate feminist organizing and mobilizi...

Tunisia's legacy of “state feminism” and its strong civil society—including human rights, labor, and women's rights organizations—have placed Tunisian women in advance of their Arab sisters, and women are present across an array of professions and occupations. Still, most Tunisian women remain outside the labor force, face precarious forms of emplo...

In his prodigious output, from works on capitalist development to analyses of Islamist movements to involvement in the World Social Forum, Samir Amin’s was a consistent voice for struggle against capitalism’s domination of the world and its peoples. In this brief essay I address his call for a shift from movement to organization, indeed, toward a k...

In his prodigious output, from works on capitalist development to analyses of Islamist movements to involvement in the World Social Forum, Samir Amin’s was a consistent voice for struggle against capitalism’s domination of the world and its peoples. In this brief essay I address his call for a shift from movement to organization, indeed, toward a k...

Populist and nationalist movements have long histories and ideologically may appear as left-wing or right-wing. Feminist scholars have explored the gender dynamics of conservative nationalist movements or national-identity projects, revealing the social-reproductive burdens placed on women as well as the reasons why such movements resonate with som...

Feminist research has revealed significant relationships between militarization, patriarchy, and gender inequality. This paper takes that research forward through an empirical analysis of the impact of militarization on gender inequality and on women's participation in the labor market. Using the Gender Inequality Index and the Global Militarizatio...

I consider prospects for revolution in the 21st century, defined here as a thorough-going world revolution that replaces the capitalist world-system with a feminist-inflected democratic socialism. An overview of 20th century revolutions and more recent uprisings suggests distinctive contemporary features, including women’s participation and the dif...

Nermin Allam, Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Pp. 221. $99.99 cloth. ISBN: 9781108434430 - Volume 51 Issue 2 - Valentine M. Moghadam

Populism has become the subject of a large and growing literature but little is written about non-Western movements, and feminist scholars have yet to grapple with its gender dynamics, including its appeal to many women voters, and its gendered social consequences. In this research note, I briefly survey the literature and show how right-wing popul...

Violence against women is present across cultures, historical periods, and political systems; it occurs in contexts of the politicization of ethnicity, wars, and criminal activity, as well as in the private sphere of the home and family. Feminist social theory locates it in (gendered) power asymmetries that manifest themselves at both micro‐ and ma...

The Arab Spring has been extensively analyzed but the presence or absence of violent protests and the divergent outcomes of the uprising that encompassed the Arab region have not been explained in terms of the salience of gender and women’s mobilizations. I argue that women’s legal status, social positions, and collective action prior to the Arab S...

The collapse of authoritarian regimes in the wake of the Arab Spring initially raised hopes for the emergence of new democracies premised on robust conceptions of citizen rights, including those of women. While some countries, such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, have descended into violent conflict, others have adopted new political and social structu...

The empowerment of women in the global south is a key goal of women's rights movements, international organizations, and international agreements such as the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals. It has also been the subject of feminist sociological research. This entry discusses the diverse ways that empowerment is conc...

Informed theoretically by feminist sociological and political science research on women’s social movements and women’s engagement with public policy, this article examines the advocacy and political work of women’s rights groups in Tunisia in the area of violence against women. It locates the origins of the concern about this particular social prob...

Studies by feminist social scientists as well as activists within transnational feminist networks have shown that globalization, flexibilization, and feminization have been interconnected processes, with unequal gender relations and female subordination underpinning the growth of low-wage jobs as more women have entered the labor market. From an ea...

The relationship between women's rights and democracy and democratization is examined, along with the gendered nature of pro-democracy movements. A summary of the structural and cultural factors and forces that underpin pro-democracy movements, and those that may predict whether or not outcomes will be compatible with women's equality and rights, i...

When Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, presented his proposed Cabinet to the Majles (parliament) in August 2013, one issue brought up in social media was the strange silence of the women members throughout the intensive four-day sessions to assess the ministerial nominees' programs before the vote of confidence. None of the nine women parliamen...

Providing an empirical and conceptual context for the volume, this chapter discusses patterns and trends in women's social and economic participation in the region, draws together the themes explored in individual chapters, and offers policy recommendations and suggestions for future research. Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have made...

A survey of women's rights activism in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from the 1980s to the Arab Spring reveals an emphasis on legal equality through family law reform, collective action against fundamentalism and political Islam, advocacy to end violence against women, and lobbying to enhance women's political participation and social rights.

Synopsis Historically, governments and social movements have evoked images of mothers as nurturing, moral, peaceful, or combative agents. But how is a maternalist frame deployed in different contexts? Who deploys this frame, for what purposes and to what ends? In this article, we present a classification scheme to elucidate the diversity and versat...

We examine prospects for the shift from an authoritarian corporatist social policy regime to a democratic and developmental one, in light of popular socio-economic and political grievances and demands. Social policy can bring about a sense of inclusion, belonging, and rights on the part of beneficiaries, and is necessary for a well-functioning and...

What has the Arab Spring meant to women, and women's rights, in the region? Three years after the mass social protests of January and February 2011, when and where can we expect the promises of democracy and equality, and the revolutionary spirit of unity and purpose, to be realised? This Foreword offers a stock-taking of events and possible future...

The Arab Spring is still unfolding, as is the direction of change, and outcomes may be different for violent and nonviolent uprisings. This article focuses on three early cases of the Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco – to discuss causes and likely outcomes, gender dynamics, prospects for genuine democratization, and the connection between...

Globalization remains a contested subject for scholars, policy-makers and activists. Its enthusiasts stress the promises of free trade, deregulation and flexibility while its detractors emphasize the problems of inequalities, unfair trade relations and militarism. Meanwhile, activists across countries have mobilized against the adverse effects of g...

In contemporary Iran, women with higher education face both gender discrimination and an unfavourable economic system, one that is not conducive to employment-generation for women. This paper provides an analysis of women's access to higher education in Iran, which has varied over the last 30 years, and their continuously limited participation in t...

How has economic reform transformed states, societies, and state-society relations in the countries of the Maghreb (North Africa)? With a focus on Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, the paper identifies new actors, opportunities, and challenges observed in the Maghreb. Specifically, it examines how—in an era of globalization characterized by neoliberal...

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials fr...

The literature on gender, women, and politics has examined both the gendered nature of political processes and women's participation patterns. Whether cast in terms of a variable or as an integral element of the social structure, gender is seen as pervading the realm of politics in that it reflects the distribution of power and reinforces notions o...

The paper examines recent debates on “Empire” and offers a feminist perspective. It asks: what are the gender dynamics of the new imperialism and its rival, Islamism? Drawing on world-system theory and feminist studies of international relations, this paper examines hegemonic masculinities in empire, war, and resistance; the cooptation of women's r...

Women in Iraq: The Gender Impact of International Sanctions. By Husein al-JawaheriYasmin. London: Zed Books. 2008. 228 pp. $57.00 cloth, $23.50 paper. - Volume 5 Issue 4 - Valentine M. Moghadam

This article examines the evolution of social policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during three periods: the post-colonial and oil-boom period, the post-oil period of structural adjustment, and the more recent oil-boom period. Drawing attention to key factors that shaped both social policy and the region's lack of competitiveness durin...

The issue of women's rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has gained prominence in research studies, policy debates and feminist activism. Area experts contend that for women to play a larger role in the economy and society is vital to the region's progress. But women in MENA still face gender discrimination that prevents them from rea...

In August 2001, a conference on the state of Middle East women's studies took place at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy. Apart from the gorgeous surroundings, the conference was memorable for the breadth and scope of the high-quality papers presented by scholars teaching in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and North A...

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 2.2 (2006) 1-7 The articles in this special issue were among those presented at a workshop we organized for the Sixth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, which took place from 16—20 March 2005, in Montecatini, Italy. The purpose of the workshop was to examine the proposition that the public sp...

That social policy is gendered is now a truism in the feminist literature. But what are the different patterns of (gendered) social policy formation and implementation across regions in the world economy? In the Middle East, for example, what are the state policies, practices and institutions that directly influence the welfare and security of vari...

The Beijing Platform for Action represented a conceptual shift from a focus on “the status of women” and “gender inequality” to the objectives of “gender equality” and “women's empowerment”. Among other things, it called for gender-disaggregated data for planning and evaluation. In this paper we define women's empowerment as a multi-dimensional pro...

Résumé Le Programme d’action de Beijing a constitué un tournant sur le plan conceptuel : alors qu’on se contentait jusqu’alors de réfléchir à la condition féminine et de stigmatiser l’inégalité entre les sexes, l’accent est mis désormais en priorité sur la réalisation de deux objectifs : « l’égalité des genres » et « l’autonomisation des femmes »....

The Islamic world has a poor record in terms of modernization and democracy. However, the source of this situation is not religion, but factors including colonialism, international economic and trading systems, and the role of the military, among others. Recognizing these themes allows the consideration of possible remedies for change in the Muslim...

In this paper, I describe how feminists in countries of the Middle East and North Africa are challenging their second-class citizenship largely institutionalized in patriarchal family laws-and are calling for an extension of their civil, political, and social rights. I use the term “feminist” to denote de jureand de factofeminists working to advanc...

Globalization is a complex economic, political, cultural, and social process in which the mobility of capital, organizations, ideas, discourses, and peoples has taken on an increasingly global or transnational form. Much has been written about the economic and cultural dimensions of globalization, but there is now a growing literature on the global...

This paper analyzes the extreme situation of Afghan women under the Taleban by casting a historical and sociological lens to highlight (a) the patriarchal nature of gender and social relations, deeply embedded in Afghanistan's traditional and fragmented ethnic-based society, and (b) the existence of a weak central state, which has been unable to im...

The horrific events of September 11, the discovery of a transnational network of Islamic extremists, and the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan compel us to think seriously about the causes of religious terrorism, the broad implications of violence and militarism, the nature of Islamic fundamen- talist movements, and the gender dynamics of political v...

This article examines the women's movement in Algeria in the context of domestic developments, such as the post-Boumedienne restructuring of the state, regional liberalization, and global developments such as the rise of Islamism and the expansion of feminism. It points to the emergence of the Algerian feminist movement during the crises of the 198...

I examine patterns, problems, and prospects of women's employment in MENA, where the regional political economy is changing in the context of the pressures of globalization. The research indicates that a trend in all countries is an increase in the supply of job-seeking women, and a “feminization” of government employment. It is likely that the ope...

This paper investigates the relationship between female labor force participation rates and structural adjustment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We put forward a new hypothesis to explain MENA's low female labor force participation rates, and argue that during the oil boom era MENA countries locked themselves into family structures and...

Current theories of social movements have added much to our understanding of the dynamics of collective action. This includes attention to the role of grievances, political opportunities and constraints, mobilizing structures, and framing processes (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, 1996). However, there are gaps and biases: (i) a Western bias and a tende...

A generation ago, British feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham (1974) asked why women were “hidden from history“—and helped to found the field of women's history. Years later, Gayatri Spivak (1988) asked, “Can the subaltern speak?“—and added a new dimension to the field of subaltern studies. Throughout, Marxists have inquired into the relationship b...

This article seeks to contribute to feminist theorizing, to globalization studies and to theories of social movements by discussing a new organizational form and a new form of women's collective action in an era of globalization: transnational feminist networks (TFNs). The article's empirical section focuses on the origins, objectives and activitie...

This paper casts a gender perspective on globalization to illuminate the contradictory effects on women workers and on women's activism. The scope of the paper is global. The sources of data are UN publications, country-based data and newsletters from women's organizations as well as the author's fieldwork. The paper begins by examining the various...

Viet Nam has a population of over 72 million, living in seven distinct geographic regions, but mostly in the northern and southern delta areas or the major cities. Infrastructure is generally poor, though it is better in the south than in the north, and is improving overall. Although Viet Nam is a very poor country — the World Bank estimates its an...