What is empowerment? How is it measured and quantified? What are the basic pillars of empowerment? Is empowerment a static concept, or does it constantly vary and transform across time and different contexts? How can empowerment be studied amid societal and political transformation? Is it time to abandon the long-standing cultural paradigm applied to the study of gender and usher in a new era of feminist studiesâone with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of womenâs issues across the MENA region?
Since the onset of the Arab Spring, images of women at the forefront of the mass demonstrations and protests have significantly raised hopes that Arab women were finally breaking their silence, defying the status quo, and fighting for their own rights. Women across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region were not only forcing their way into the public sphere, but also shattering long-standing cultural stereotypes about their roles in societyânot only in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya but also in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemenâwhile defying brutal practices by persistent authoritarian regimes. Women played a crucial role in these popular uprisings by calling for dignity, bread, and social justice. They believed that gender equality and womenâs rights were inseparable from popular demands for dignity and justice. However, the collapse of democratic aspirations throughout the MENA regionâexacerbated by the weakening of state structures in many parts of the region and the rise of ethnic and religious conflictânegatively impacted the advancement of womenâs rights, especially in post-revolution political systems.
Despite the fact that several Arab countries have taken considerable strides to improve womenâs status since the onset of the Arab Spring, achieving gender parity is far from complete. Positive developments in several Arab statesâsuch as Tunisiaâs 50 percent constitutional quota for women, the repeal of the rape marriage law in Morocco, the guarantee of 25 percent of seats for women in Egyptâs municipal elections, and the introduction of the âzippered listâ electoral mechanism in Libyaâare just the beginning. Women across the region still face innumerable challenges, from honor killings, domestic violence, unjust personal and family laws, citizenship laws, and sexual harassment to discrimination in the workplace, the gender wage gap, occupational sex segregation, and unequal access to political and leadership positions.
Both academics and policy practitioners have come to the conclusion that there is an urgent need to initiate a comprehensive, gender-focused reform process based on a deeper understanding of the cultural peculiarities of the region, while paying special attention to the societal and structural challenges facing Arab women during and after transitions. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly clear that change in regard to womenâs rights must be initiated from within Arab societies; efforts over the past few decades to promulgate a hegemonic Western feminist agenda inattentive to regional cultural peculiarities and the diversity of priorities have proved futile in improving the social status of Arab women. As Sabbagh once eloquently stated, âArab women carry many burdens, the worst being the popular stereotypes that serve to establish the positional superiority of western women and constitute a worse injustice against Arab women than the patriarchal oppression they must face in their own countriesâ (Sabbagh 1996).
The collection of essays in this book aims to present a comprehensive, interdisciplinary view of the opportunities as well as the challenges currently facing women in the MENA region, especially postâArab Spring. As maintained by Cavadar and Yasar (2014), âa better understanding of Middle Eastern women requires analytical tools used in a comparative, contextualized, and interdisciplinary fashion instead of an exclusive focus on the methods that give attention only to outcomesâ (p. 34). To achieve this goal, the analyses presented in this book shed light on some of the most critical issues impeding the advancement of womenâs rights, such as patriarchy and Islam, barriers to womenâs agency in the legal and socioeconomic realms, womenâs access to the decision-making process, citizenship rights, and the impact of conflict on womenâs status across the region. Finally, this edited volume strives to propose tangible policy prescriptions and insights based on the findings of the authorsâ research to advance womenâs rights at this critical point in the regionâs history.
Reconceptualizing Womenâs Empowerment Amid Political and Societal Transition in the Arab World
By and large, interest in gender issues in generalâand womenâs empowerment in particularâhas gained momentum over the past few decades. The UN decade for women (1975â1985), the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, and the resulting Platform for Action (United Nations 1995), which emphasized womenâs empowerment as the cornerstone of equality, development, and peace, paved the way for a new era of feminist scholarship. Empowerment has become a very powerful term that is extensively used across disciplines and among different academic and policy circles. Moreover, the past decade has witnessed the mainstreaming of the concept across different public and policy realms. However, various scholars and policy practitioners have critiqued the mainstreaming of âempowerment,â as they believe it distorts the original purpose and strength of the concept (i.e., the transformative power of empowerment to alter gender relations) by confining the term to the fields of development and economic growth (Batliwala 2007).
Ironically, despite the popularity of the term, as of yet, there is no universally accepted definition for empowerment. While various debates over the meaning of empowerment carry on (Beteta 2006; Drydyk 2013), many consider its ambiguity an advantage that gives scholars and policy practitioners the ability to âwork it out in actions termsâ (Batliwala 1994). Attempts to measure empowerment have also encountered challenges from both theoretical and practical standpoints (Batliwala and Pittman 2010; Pillarisetti and McGillivray 1998). Due to the multifaceted nature of empowerment, academics and policy researchers adopt different approaches to test its generalizability and effectiveness across different settings and cultures. While some scholars focus on the dichotomy of top-down versus grassroots/participatory approaches to the process of empowerment, others focus on the process from a developmental (i.e., collective) standpoint (USAID 2012) with little or no interest in understanding the mechanisms of empowerment on the individual level and its emphasis on the ideas of âagency,â âcontrol,â and âchoice.â Nonetheless, despite the obvious limitations of the developmental approach to the study of female empowerment (Porter 2013), the recognition of gender equality and female empowerment as critical prerequisites for achieving sustainable development and prosperity has undeniably transformed both policy research and practice.
Being the main pillar of âempowerment,â feminist studies have also witnessed the shift from a narrow focus on the notion of âpowerâ that simply conceptualizes empowerment as the end goal, to a more nuanced approach that takes into consideration the context and barriers to womenâs exercise of power (Rowlands 1998). Accordingly, empowerment is conceptualized as a tool to achieve desirable outcomes and specific goals. Its strength lies in its transformative ability to affect power relations in societiesâmost importantly, gender relations and the resilient patriarchal structures they produce. Consequently, many studies have emerged paying more attention to this dimension of individual versus collective empowerment. In this respect, Moserâs work offers an excellent example; she defines empowerment as âthe ability to determine the choices in life and to influence the direction of change, through the ability to gain control over crucial material and non-material resourcesâ (Moser 1993, 74â75).
There is a wide variation in how scholars conceptualize empowerment based on the approach they employ in their work. These variations have profound theoretical implications as well as empirical ones. Whereas empowerment was defined in 30 different ways over the past few decades (Alkire and Ibrahim 2007), Kabeerâs theoretical framework continues to be one of the most cited sources on the topic. In her seminal work, she defines empowerment as âa process of change during which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such an abilityâ (Kabeer 1999, 437).
According to Kabeerâs definition, empowerment is deemed as a multistage process that revolves around the individualâs capacity to make choices, regardless of the nature or the context of the choices. Kabeer identifies three main elements necessary for the exercise of choice: resources, agency, and achievements. The resources element is external to the individualâs capabilities or control, and it entails the availability of necessary (pre-) conditions for survival that are social, economic, and institutional in nature. Agency, in contrast, is an internal process that depends on the ability of the individual to uncover his own preferences and objectives. Finally, achievement is deemed to be the final outcome of this process of change that mainly depends on the availability of resources and agency. As a result of this view, empowerment is depicted as both a process and an outcome (Papart et al. 2002).
Alternatively, Moghadam and Senftova define empowerment from a developmental standpoint as âa multi-dimensional process of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural participation and rightsâ (Moghadam and Senftova 2005). In this view, empowerment is a multidimensional process rather than a holistic, multistage process. The strength of this approach lies in the fact that it allows for the measurement and evaluation of womenâs empowerment across different contexts and settings, using a number of uniform measures. The study presents 44 different indicators that measure seven main domains of empowerment: sociodemographic, bodily integrity and health, literacy and educational attainment, economic participation and rights, political participation and rights, and cultural participation and rights. 1 However, given the scarcity of data, especially in developing countries, combined with the difficulty of capturing changes in cultural and social norms often complicates the systematic study and application of this conceptualization of empowerment.
More recently, Haghighat defines empowerment from a sociocultural perspective, with a special focus on the MENA region. She argues, âWomenâs empowerment cannot simply be defined in terms of being able to perform specific activities or benefitting from propitious outcomes. It results from a process whereby women can freely analyze, develop, and voice their needs and interests without being predefined or unwillingly imposed by religion, government, or social norms and where their influence and control extends beyond womenâs familial/kinship circlesâ (Haghighat 2013, 274). According to this conceptualization, the process of womenâs empowerment in the MENA region goes well beyond the narrow developmental and individualistic approaches. For that reason, efforts to improve the status of women in the region should pay special attention to the influence of family and kin relationships on limiting womenâs ability to exercise power and make personal choices in their societies.
Notwithstanding the difficulties associated with defining and measuring the notion of empowerment across disciplines and contexts, the task gets even more daunting under the present situation in the MENA: a time of political and social transformation and uncertainty. The surge of violence and radicalism across the region continues to pose a real challenge to the promotion of womenâs rights, and further, the ongoing volatility of the political and social structures of many Arab countries ra...