Women were visible and effective in the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. Will this moment of opening yield empowering outcomes? Deniz Kandiyoti argues that the greatest peril lies in truncated or aborted transitions where women’s rights are offered up as an item of populist compromise
Although the women’s movement in Turkey has scored major victories in the realm of legal reforms, there is a widening gap between rights in law and realities on the ground. How secure are these gains?
The challenge to platforms for gender equality comes not just from actors with fundamentalist agendas, but from a conjuncture where women’s rights have been opportunistically instrumentalized to serve geopolitical goals, and neo-liberal policies have severed social justice from gender equality con
While the only official woman delegate in the Afghan mission to the London Conference pleaded that women’s rights must not be sacrificed on the altar of security concerns, women’s rights activists who had also travelled to London brought their own message
War and mismanagement have produced a breakdown of trust, decency and reciprocity in Afghan society. Gender activism needs to be understood in that context, and not be tempted by crude cultural determinism.
In 2002, the bazaar in Andijan, Uzbekistan, witnessed an unusual scene. The police approached a trader selling coats and demanded to see his papers. When it became clear that they
Deniz Kandiyoti: We have just listened to a wonderfully nuanced, multi-layered account of a close inspection of a particular Islamic community in Germany.
What I heard Werner Schiffauer say is
