Algerian Feminists Navigate Authoritarianism

Women Rising ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 129-134
Author(s):  
Maro Youssef

Algerian feminists, who are committed to advancing human rights and women’s rights, oddly supported the authoritarian rule of President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika and viewed him as the best option available to women. In this chapter, Maro Youssef argues that secular Algerian feminists are not passive victims of patriarchy but rather active agents and complex subjects who negotiate and renegotiate their contract with the state to advance their interests. She explores how feminists’ position is founded in their fear of the Islamists and their beliefs that Bouteflika is capable of preventing Islamists from regaining power. By aligning their efforts with the state, women believe that they can stop Islamists from reversing the rights that women have already achieved or imposing their conservative version of Islam on the Algerian society.

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles G Ngwena

AbstractThis article is constructed around the premise that women's rights to safe abortion give rise to obligations that the state has a positive duty to implement. Using Uganda as a case study, it frames failure by a state to implement its abortion laws in ways that render the rights tangible and accessible to women as a violation of human rights. The article develops a normative human rights framework for imposing on a state the obligation to take positive steps to implement abortion laws that the state, itself, has adopted. The framework does not depend on requiring the state first to reform its substantive laws or broaden the grounds for abortion. Rather, it focuses on the implementation of existing domestic laws. The article draws its remedial juridical responses partly from conceptions of women-centred rights to procedural justice, equality and health, and partly from jurisprudence developed in recent years by United Nations treaty-monitoring bodies and the European Court of Human Rights.


This volume reframes the debate around Islam and women’s rights within a broader comparative literature. It examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality. Part I addresses the nexus of religion, law, gender, and democracy through different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, anthropology, political science, law). Part II localizes the implementation of this nexus between law, gender, and democracy, and provides contextualized responses to questions raised in Part I. The contributors explore the situation of Muslim women’s rights vis-à-vis human rights to shed light on gender politics in the modernization of the nation and to ponder over the role of Islam in gender inequality across different Muslim countries.


Midwifery ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Thomson

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-253
Author(s):  
Juanita Kakoty

This piece is based on a conversation the author had with lawyer and human rights activist from Pakistan, Hina Jilani, in May 2016. It captures Jilani’s account of the ‘Satyagraha’ she has waged in her lifetime for the rights of women in her country; and as she narrates her story, she interweaves it with the ‘Satyagraha’ that shaped the women’s movement in Pakistan. One can read here about Jilani’s struggle for truth, for a human rights consciousness in a political climate of military regime; and how she challenged courts in the country to step outside the realm of conventional law and extend justice to women and girls. And in the process, learn that her struggle for truth has been intertwined with that of the women’s movement in the country.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Bunch

This article discusses women and gender, and first identifies the differences between the concepts. It moves on to a critical examination of the norms and their institutional manifestations, along with selected UN system efforts to promote women's rights in development, peace and security, human rights, and health. The article also provides a balanced evaluation of how much things have changed for girls and women over the last sixty years.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen M. Kinsella ◽  
Laura Sjoberg

AbstractIn this article, we focus on the subset of evolutionary theorising self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) within security studies and International Relations. We offer this accounting in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the argument that reproductive interests are the ‘origins’ of international violence. Second, we break down the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality used in evolutionary work in security studies generally and in FEA specifically, demonstrating a lack of complexity in FEA’s accounts of the potential relations among the three and critiquing their essentialist heteronormative assumptions. Third, we argue that FEA’s failure to reflect on the history and context of evolutionary theorising, much less contemporary feminist critiques, facilitates its forwarding of the state and institutions as primarily neutral and corrective bulwarks against male violence. Fourth, we conclude by outlining what is at stake if we fail to correct for this direction in feminist, IR, and security research. We argue that FEA work misrepresents and narrows the potential for understanding and responding to violence, facilitating the continued instrumentalisation of women’s rights, increased government regulation of sexuality, and a more expansive form of militarism.


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