During the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurds, Kurdish women’s organizations in Turkey have participated to several different meetings by international institutions and transnational feminist organizations, and mobilized around international days (such as, November 25 International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) in order to address the increasing ‘violence against women’ in Turkey and more specifically in Turkish Kurdistan. Through these meetings and demonstrations, Kurdish women activists underlined the obligations of the Turkish state under the international law and treaties, and encouraged the state officials to take action. However, the termination of the peace process and the recently perpetrated political operations against the Kurdish women’s movement (the arrests of the prominent Kurdish women activists and politicians, and the closings of the Kurdish women’s organizations) call for rethinking the role played by the “transnational leverage” (Ewig & Ferree 2013) in the activists’ negotiations with the Turkish state. Based on in-depth interviews with Kurdish women activists from different organizations, my paper addresses this shift and asks: What types of mobilization strategies does the Kurdish women’s movement use to mobilize against gender-based violence in a context of increased war and conflict that obstruct transnational connections? And, in what ways do they implement international legal and political norms and regulations and resort to transnational feminist solidarity relations in their negotiations with the state? The scholarship on the women’s movements in the Middle East mainly addresses how the challenges that women face at the national level vis-à-vis their states encourage them to pursue transnational connections. (Al-Ali 2000; Hasso 2014) Transnational feminism literature also argues that global meetings and transnational connections energize women’s local mobilizations by providing them with the “legitimate” frameworks to articulate their issues and confront their states. (Brysk 1993; Keck & Sikkink 1998; Friedman 2003) In this paper, I will contribute to these scholarships by keeping in mind the recent shift towards the weakening of the international institutions’ power and the growing restrictions over transnational connections.

This paper discusses the roles the women’s movement, international organizations and the state have played in the legal improvements and setbacks regarding eliminating violence against women (VAW) in Turkey. More specifically, it inquires how the post-2000 period, which started with significant legal developments that reinforced gender equality (e.g. the new Civil and Penal Codes), has reached to a point where the government attempts to revoke women’s gained rights through laws and policies that openly establish a hierarchical gender regime (e.g. by making divorce and reporting violence more difficult). The aforementioned legal improvements are rightfully explained by the efforts of Turkey’s strong women’s/feminist movements and the pressure from the international community (e.g. the EU-imposed regulations). But how do we account for the current fact that gender violence in Turkey, the proud first signatory of the Istanbul Treaty against VAW, is largely tolerated by the legal system and encouraged by the ruling elite? How has the state come to disregard once influential coalition of international organizations and local women’s/feminist movement? Based on in-depth interviews with feminist lawyers/activists, critical discourse analysis of politicians’ declarations, and content analysis of parliamentary records concerning VAW, I argue that the answers to these questions lie in the transformations in the state’s identity and ideology, which are key factors in determining the level of impact the local and transnational advocacy can have. In explaining Turkish state’s transition from a pro-democracy position to a violently totalitarian regime, I develop the concept of “new fascism,” referring to the recent global trend sustained by the discourses of racism, nationalism and gender inequality. The ruling elite of new fascism not only openly circulates misogynistic hate speech but also institutionalizes it through laws and policies targeting women’s lives and rights. They also delegitimize justice/equality demands by, for instance, marking advocacy groups and the international community as co-conspirators against Turkey. Thus, this contemporary form of rule needs further explanation to understand this stagnation, if not recession, in women’s rights. As such, this paper contributes to the women’s movement and solidarity literatures that focus on bargaining with the state (Kandiyoti 1988) and the effectiveness of transnational coalitions in ending VAW (Hasso 2014; Brand 1998; Al-Ali 2000). It also helps developing new mobilization and advocacy methods to overcome the resistance by a paternalistic state that is not responsive to international pressure and local demands.

My paper analyzes a legal case in the United Arab Emirates involving a woman who took her husband to court for physically abusing her and her adult daughter. According to the National newspaper, the husband inflicted injuries on his 23-year-old daughter and wife that required medical treatment. The woman in this case chose to adjudicate the complaint against her husband in the civil courts. The case went from the lower courts to the Federal Supreme Court. Citing a verse from the Quran, Chief Justice Falah al-Hajeri of the Federal Supreme Court upheld the conviction of the husband in the lower court while also acknowledging the right of a husband to discipline his wife – but not his adult daughter – “provided he does not leave physical marks.” The ruling ignited a nationwide debate with conflicting opinions aired in the press in letters to the editor and in essays by legal and religious scholars and clerics. The ruling was criticized by Human Rights Watch on the grounds that violence against a wife by her husband is a crime and should not be condoned in any circumstances. My paper argues that the woman in this case chose to act as a citizen with rights rather than as a subject of her husband’s arbitrary authority within the family. Her action, perhaps more than the ruling itself, can be regarded as liberating because it challenged her husband’s unchecked authority over her and her daughter and identified her as a citizen with rights according to the UAE constitution. This case allows us to examine the various ways that contrasting legal frameworks define gender and women’s rights and the role that shari`a plays in the country’s legal system.

The ways in which Sudanese, either unconsciously or through indoctrination, remember their pasts and interpret their present are often performances of some type of violence—physical or psychological--against women. Using personal narratives, participant observation, and archives, I have been researching Sudan’s many conflicts—political, military, ethnic, regional or a civil war, genocidal onslaughts, or dissident parties vying to survive—in order to observe the ways people see/remember themselves: e.g., as “heroically” dealing with these conflicts; as bystanders; as supporters of the heroic ones; as victims. No matter the kind of conflict, all of the performances are highly gendered. Public (e.g., in spectacles), semi-public (e.g., within a political party), and private, performances of the “heroic life” (using Srile Roy’s term) are most often by men; whereas women’s performances are most often as direct victims of violence, “innocent” bystander/victims, or nurturers to the martyrs living underground or in prisons. These are competing memories of the past and renditions of the present. In the contemporary armed conflicts in Darfur (western Sudan) and the Nuba Mountains (southwestern Sudan), women and men, as well as various ethnic groups and people with differing modes of economy, remember their conflictual pasts differently. Much of the “homeland’s” past is not only gendered, but embodied. In fact, in most instances of gender-based violence, memory is linked to women’s bodies and the “homeland.” In Darfur and the Nuba Mountains women have been subjected to forms of sexual violence and other atrocities. These violations are remembered differently by perpetrator and victim, but the relationship of the perpetrator and victim may be one of ambivalence, unsettling notions of who did what to whom, where, and under what circumstances. Furthermore, these relationships are fluid among various actors from among guerilla groups, state military and para-militaries, refugees, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), and citizens with varied subsistence activities, not to mention international media and NGO’s. These gendered conflicts generate gendered memories, e.g., men try to colonize women’s renditions of the past, and women often resist that colonization. Men and state actors’ strategies are aimed at forced amnesia, indoctrinated memories, and at valorizing one group’s past and present over another’s. Whether the “heroic life” of dissident activists or the militarized life of regional struggles, the politics of memory is played out on women’s bodies, and women themselves can often be complicit in the process.

The “gender-deficit literature” (El-Said, Meari & Pratt 2015) is no more clear than in Lebanon, where gender justice activism has taken myriad forms. Following the wave of 2011 uprisings, feminist activists in Lebanon began mobilizing, resulting in the development of a number of new nongovernment organizations (NGO) and civil society organizations (CSO) dedicated to issues of gender equality. Lebanon now boasts one of the most robust activist landscapes: KAFA (Enough!) Violence & Exploitation provides a 24/7 phone hotline for reporting instances of sexual violence and assault; ABAAD (Dimensions) has established 8 Women and Girl Safe Spaces (WGSS) around the country; the National Commission for Lebanese Women (NCLW) has led the development of a national response plan for gender-based violence and reporting to municipal and national authorities. In August 2016, a collaboration of these gender activist groups signed the Beirut Call to Action; signed by a number of international, regional, and national organizations dedicated to women’s rights, the Beirut Call to Action promises to put women’s and gender rights at the forefront of policy and activist work in the region. In December 2016, coordinated action between these activist groups forced members of the Parliamentary Committee for Administration and Justice to agree to repeal Article 522 of the Lebanese Penal Code, which negates any legal convictions of a person who has committed rape, kidnapping or statutory rape if he marries the victim. As Lebanese women’s and gender rights activists continue to forge expanding networks of solidarity, this paper focuses on the strategies and modalities of such network building. Women’s and gender rights provides the potential for inter-sectarian solidarity; it might also worse sectarian divisions between these activist groups. Using in-depth interviews and analysis of project and research documents from a variety of women’s and gender rights organizations, this paper hopes to shed light on the relationship between sectarian divides in Lebanon and gender activist organizations. Does the divide make for different intra-organization strategies and networking? Does the issue of women’s and gender rights provide a point of solidarity? How do activists embedded in these networks see themselves? How do these activists see the work that they’re doing as it relates nationally? Regionally? Internationally? And finally, how are international women’s and gender rights treatises and conventions a part of such strategies? Do these international instruments prove more useful than national instruments?