Syria

Author(s):  
Franck Salameh

Syria's literati have been producing work alluding to the nebulous nature of their modern state, and perhaps foretelling its unmaking; not because multi-ethnic nation-states are by their very nature doomed to failure, but because inherently multi-ethnic states preening themselves to be unitary, monocultural, and monolingual, must sooner or later come to terms with their diversity, and must find ways to valorize and celebrate that diversity. This chapter features authors that attempted to do their part in acknowledging textured identities. These include Nizar Qabbani (1923–98), recognized as the Arabs' leading feminist and advocate of women's rights; and Syro-Lebanese writer Ali Ahmad Said Ispir—known primarily by his nom de plume, Adonis (b. 1930).

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 503-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunhye Yoo

World polity scholars posit that the diffusion of world culture and norms increasingly influences human rights as well as women’s rights. However, previous research on women’s rights and policies often neglects women’s social rights and focuses mainly on women’s political rights. In part due to neoliberal restructuring, women’s social rights still lag behind women’s political rights. This research focuses on changes in women’s social rights, as measured by the CIRI human rights index, in 140 countries from 1984 to 2004. To interpret these data, I incorporate world institutionalism and neoliberalism into one single theoretical frame. My analysis reveals that the longer a country is exposed to a neoliberal structural adjustment program, the more governments’ practices regarding women’s social rights deteriorate. Among various linkages to the world polity, only the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) increases nation-states’ likelihood of having improved women’s social rights. These findings suggest that global neoliberal restructuring has a deleterious effect on women’s social rights and challenge the claim that the spread of global culture necessarily leads to improvements in governments’ practices relating to women’s social rights.


1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Molnar

Freud's translation of J.S. Mill involved an encounter with the traditions of British empirical philosophy and associationist psychology, both of which go back to Locke and Hume. The translation of Mill's essay on Plato also brought Freud into contact with the philosophical controversy between the advocates of intuition and faith and the advocates of perception and reason. A comparison of source and translated texts demonstrates Freud's faithfulness to his author. A few significant deviations may be connected with Freud's ambiguous attitude to women's rights, as advocated in the essay The Enfranchisement of Women. Stylistically Freud had nothing to learn from Mill. His model in English was Macaulay, whom he was also reading at this period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi E. Rademacher

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.


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