Aspects pertaining to social citizenship, i.e. the distribution of resources and benefits as envisaged by Rokkan, are focused upon in terms of the impact of economic globalization in terms of presenting powerful pressures for change. Economic factors enter the analysis on the politics of citizenship in chapters 4 and 5 through a focus on female citizenship and the impact of economic forces of change towards political liberalization with reference to gendered state laws. In these chapters, I point that economic globalization paved the way for the introduction of human rights standards, including the strengthening of women’s rights through the framework of the Women’s Convention, CEDAW.308 Also, with the increase in female labour, employed women and labour unions began to highlight economic, social and legal issues and present demands in order to improve their living conditions.309 Pressures for change in family law are presented as part of these demands.
Debates over family law and pressures to change existing gendered laws in Arab states are multifaceted. On the one hand, the primacy of kinship-based social and political systems accentuates the importance of family laws due to the profound social and economic
307
Rokkan, "Dimensions of state formation and nation-building: A possible paradigm for research on variations within Europe," 572, emphasis in original.
308
CEDAW is the acronym of The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women. ‘CEDAW’ and ‘The Women’s Convention’ are used interchangeably in the thesis.
309
On general features of economic globalization, see Ngaire Woods and Andrew Hurrell, Inequality, globalization, and world politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For the impact of globalization on female economic rights, see Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Marsha Pripstein Posusney, "Introduction: The mixed blessings of globalization," in Women and globalization in the Arab Middle East: gender, economy, and society, ed. Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Marsha Pripstein Posusney (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003). See also Valentine M. Moghadam, Women, work, and economic reform in the Middle East and North Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing women: gender and social change in the Middle East (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
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impact of these laws on the quality of life of all family members, including females who are predominantly outside the waged labour market. On the other hand, they should be understood as fundamental individual and group struggles for welfare, since in the absence of expansive welfare states, family remains the essential guarantor of individual welfare in Arab states. Karshenas and Moghadam point, for instance, that “family law is social policy” in their analysis of the impact of economic globalization on variances in the development of economic citizenship in MENA.310 Moghadam observes, moreover, that it is “employed women who have been the ones to recognize gender injustices and to mobilize for women’s participation and rights” by entering into coalitions with trade unions and human rights organizations to obtain social and economic rights.311
Researchers on women and economic participation emphasize that economic liberalization led to an increase in female labour participation. Karshenas and Moghadam point that the increase in labour participation in MENA has been the highest in the world between 1960 and 2000, and indicate that MENA women’s share of this increase is strikingly high at 4,7 per cent, while it is 2,6 per cent in Latin America and 1,1 in South East Asia.312 The authors argue that although Arab women’s labour participation is the lowest in the world, the overall increase in female labour participation reflect two central moments: first, more people were outside the waged labour market in MENA compared with other regions in the world as reflected in considerably higher shares of unemployment. Second, poverty has been feminized: partly because the salaries of unskilled labour in the private sector has been reduced to an extent that women to a higher degree choose the lowest paid jobs, and partly because more unemployed men are not able to fulfil their role as breadwinners for their families.313
Writing already in 1991, i.e. before the forces of economic globalization were visible a decade later, Kandiyoti theorized on the breakdown of ‘the patriarchal contract’ in times of crisis which is bolstered on traditional gender roles of male providers and female caretakers.
310
Massoud Karshenas and Valentine M. Moghadam, eds., Social policy in the Middle East: economic, political, and gender dynamics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 222.
311
Moghadam, V. M., 2008. “Globalization, the state and women’s economic citizenship in the Maghreb”. Paper presented at the Societal Transformations in the Middle East conference, Yale University, 30-31 January 2009. See also Valentine M. Moghadam, "States and Social Rights: Women's Economic Citizenship in the Maghreb," Middle East Law and Governance 2, no. 2 (2010): 186.
312
Karshenas and Moghadam, Social policy in the Middle East: economic, political, and gender dynamics, 13.
313
I elaborate more on the economic dimensions of labor participation in Rania Maktabi, "Arabiske kvinners statsborgerskap [Arab Women's Citizenship]," Babylon, no. 2 (2011): 13-15. The article can be retrieved at
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During economic transformational processes women may find themselves caught between their active support for maintaining and sustaining conservative gender roles, and a “genuine personal tragedy, since they have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits.”314
Economic crisis can thus be seen as significant incentives for pressures made by women’s associations to demand changes in conditions that limit and contain women’s economic position. 315 The economic and financial impetus of reforms in family law on individually-based rights for females and women’s social citizenship is, in other words, significant.
314
Kandiyoti, "Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective," 230.
315
The Norwegian historian Hilde Sandvik points at an interesting parallel to the financial crisis in Norway during the 1860s which prompted previously reluctant male politicians to support parliamentary reforms that gave female citizens full independent legal authority over property and revenues. See “Der, hvor de ikke driver handel, selger de heller ikke sin sjarme», http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/c17251/artikkel/vis.html?tid=61040, accessed 10 August 2011. See also Hilde Sandvik, "Kvinners rettslige handleevne på 1600- og 1700-tallet, med linjer fram til gifte kvinners myndighet i 1888 [Women's legal capacity in the 17th and 18th century, with lines towards married women's full legal capacity in 1888]" (Det humanistiske fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo, 2002).
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7 Methodological considerations
“Our final question: How do politicians know on which issues to generate demands? An answer to this question requires a careful definition of political astuteness, a topic we dare not entertain! At this point politics becomes art, not science. Or at any rate it becomes psychology, not political science.”316
Having stated the theoretical framework of the thesis, I have implicitly presented certain perceptions and understandings of social and political processes in contemporary states in the Middle East.
In this section I comment on some of the advantages and disadvantages in perceiving political processes within a Rokkanian analytical framework. I also point at the sets of instruments used to operationalize the politics of citizenship, and then reflect over implicit assumptions and weaknesses in my methodological approach. After all, our methods “dictate the problems we study rather than vice versa.”317
7.1 Making Rokkan’s conceptual maps relevant: strengths and weaknesses