The Fragmentation of Gender in Post-Invasion Iraq

Author(s):  
Zahra Ali

This chapter explores the evolution of gender and women’s rights struggles in Iraq since the establishment of the Personal Status Code in 1959 and shed light on the ethnosectarian fragmentation of women’s legal rights in post-invasion Iraq. The chapter argues that in order to explore women’s rights and conditions of lives in Iraq it is essential to explore the evolution of women’s rights and gender issues historically and through a complex lens of analysis rather than applying a predefined argument involving an undifferentiated “Islam” or age-old gender-based violence. It seeks to show that gender issues have been entangled with issues of nationhood, religion, and with the nature of the political regime since the very foundation of the Iraqi Republic in 1958. First, the chapter examines the debates and mobilizations around women’s legal rights in Iraq. Secondly, it highlights the development of political, economic, and military violence since the 1980s and its impact on gender norms and relations. Finally, it analyzes the specific context of ethnosectarian fragmentation in which Iraqi women have lived and mobilized since 2003.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Yetimwork Anteneh Wondim

Irrespective of their contribution, women in Ethiopia have been facing issues like violence, gender-based discrimination, access to education and training, lack of basic human rights protection, and others. Girls' enrollment in education at all levels is much lower than boys. Female education is hampered mainly by the sexual division of labor, which confines girls to household activities. In addition, women have been suffering from gender-based violence under the guise of tradition and culture but condoned by society. In response to these problems, the Government of Ethiopia adopted relevant instruments pertaining to gender including the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), The Beijing Platform for Action, The Ethiopian Constitution, and various other policies and establishing the national machinery for addressing gender issues. However, several challenges still exist in the realization of women's rights. Therefore, all the respect and protection given for human rights should also be given to women because women's rights are human rights.


Author(s):  
Johanna Bond

In the colonial and postcolonial period, African women have advocated for legal reforms that would improve the status of women across the continent. During the colonial period, European common and civil law systems greatly influenced African indigenous legal systems and further entrenched patriarchal aspects of the law. In the years since independence, women’s rights advocates have fought, with varying degrees of success, for women’s equality within the constitution, the family, the political arena, property rights, rights to inheritance, rights to be free from gender-based violence, rights to control their reproductive lives and health, rights to education, and many other aspects of life. Legal developments at the international, national, and local levels reflect the efforts of countless African women’s rights activists to improve the status of women within the region.


2020 ◽  
pp. 145-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nomi Dave

This chapter examines the limits of musical activism by considering some of the varied ways in which music has addressed women’s rights and gender-based violence in Guinea. It centers around the case of a young Guinean rapper who was recently charged with sexual assault, and whose case generated intense criticism from feminist activists and intense support from his fans. The chapter considers two songs closely connected to the case: one that calls for an end to violence against women, and one that calls on women to forgive him. These two songs seem to reflect radically divergent views on gender-based violence. But they are both linked to an underlying ambivalence about women’s rights on the behalf of musicians, audiences, and the state. Survivors of sexual violence are absent in both cases, erased by a politics of forgiveness that calls on them to forget and to be forgotten.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-462
Author(s):  
Pearl K. Atuhaire ◽  
◽  
Sylvia Blanche Kaye ◽  

While the need for equal access to civil, political as well as economic, social and cultural rights is clear under the international law, the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against women in 1979 made this even clearer. Despite this positive progress, the abuse of refugee women's rights is one of the basic underlying root causes of their marginalisation and violence in their countries of asylum. This paper presents a critical review on the development of refugee women's rights at the international levels and national levels. It provides an array of scholarly literature on this issue and examines the measures taken by the international community to curb the problem of violence against women in their various provisions through the instruments set. It is cognizant of the fact that even if conflict affects both refugee women and men, the effects on women refugees are deep-reaching, due to the cultural strongholds they face. An important aspect of this paper is that it is conceptualised against the fact that refugee women face the problem of sexual and gender based first as refugees and second as women, yet, their rights are stumbled upon. Often times they have been rendered "worthless victims" who are only in need of humanitarian assistance than active participants committed to change their plight through their participation in political, economic and social participation in their societies. Scholars have taken notice of the fact that women's rights in refugee settings have been marginalized and call for a need to incorporate their perspectives in the planning and management of refugee settings in which they live. Underpinning this discussion is feminism theory which gives a clear understanding of the root cause of refugee women's problems. Finally, this paper suggests that these policies should be translated into action at local, national international and regional levels to ensure sustainable peace.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 731-747
Author(s):  
Elise Ketelaars

AbstractWith RRW populist actors’ discovery of gender norms as a useful foreign policy tool, narratives constructed in terms of geographical value spaces have become central to the struggle for women's rights. Through a detailed examination of international and domestic actors’ engagement with the failed ratification process of the Istanbul Convention in Ukraine, this article aims to enhance understanding of the appropriateness of the use of these geographical value spaces when describing the struggle to combat GBV in Ukraine, and how connecting gender justice issues to geographically restricted value spaces impacts this fight. It finds that in practice neither the EU – despite Russia's allegations to the contrary – nor domestic political elites in favour of closer cooperation with Europe have provided meaningful support to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. Faced with this situation, some Ukrainian feminists have increasingly sought to present the struggle to combat gender-based violence in a locally acceptable vernacular. This article, however, concludes that framing the struggle for women's rights in any type of geographical terms – be they of an international or domestic nature – increases the risk of either instrumentalisation of or selective engagement with the feminist agenda.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Voller

AbstractThe struggle against gender-based violence in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed some significant achievements since the late 1990s. A subject long excluded from public discourse in the region, it has now moved increasingly into the mainstream, compelling the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to take legal and practical measures against such practices as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and domestic violence. This article traces the sources of these shifts in the KRG's stance, looking especially at the role of transnational women's rights networks in the region. It highlights these networks’ successful strategy of binding their cause to the KRG's endeavor to legitimize and consolidate its contested sovereignty over the Kurdistan Region. In doing so, the paper addresses an underexplored subject in the literature on women's rights campaigns in the Kurdistan Region and contributes to the study of transnational advocacy as a source of normative change.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 715-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Bergeron ◽  
Carol Cohn ◽  
Claire Duncanson

As feminists who think about war and peacebuilding, we cannot help but encounter the complex, entwined political economic processes that underlie wars’ causes, their courses, and the challenges of postwar reconstruction. For us, then, the increasing academic division between feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE) has been a cause for concern, and we welcomed Politics & Gender’s earlier Critical Perspectives section on efforts to bridge the two (June 2015). We noticed, however, that although violence was addressed in several of the special section's articles, war made only brief and somewhat peripheral appearances, and peacebuilding was all but absent. While three contributions (Hudson 2015; Sjoberg 2015; True 2015) mentioned the importance of political economy in the analysis of armed conflict, the aspects of war on which the articles focused were militarized sexualities (Sjoberg 2015) or conflict-related and postwar sexual and gender-based violence (Hudson 2015; True 2015).


Author(s):  
Naila Farah

Today's women's issues are still very important to pay attention to because women's rights have not been fully fulfilled. The marginalization of women's rights often stems from local religious and cultural beliefs. This is where the importance of the thinking of figures like Asghar Ali Engineer is reviewed in the present. This paper discusses the thoughts of Asghar Ali Engineer about liberation theology in the matter of women's rights in Islam. Asghar Ali Engineer in many of his works has offered various kinds of deconstruction of discourses. In the matter of women's rights in Islam, he presents his opinion on inheritance, wealth, testimony, the position of women in the family, polygamy and divorce which are considered as examples of inequality. With its hermeneutic interpretation, Asghar Engineering rejects the existence of a patriarchal concept that is inherent in the classical interpretation of the Quran, which is considered discriminatory against women. Then he applies the verses of the Quran into two, namely normative and contextual, with the hope that the verses of the Quran can be reinterpreted, so that it truly becomes a universal verses of “das solen” on one side and contextual verses of “das sein” on the other. Thus, the equality of men and women can be realized and gender-based justice can be manifested.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document