Women have enjoyed uninterrupted political rights since the 1990 unification of North and South Yemen but have watched their role and voice within the competitive party process systematically decline over the course of several election cycles. The authors argue that this is the joint result of regime encroachment on political freedom and in-fighting within an emergent opposition alliance. Based predominantly on primary sources and first person interviews conducted with women activists in Yemen between 1996 and 2009, the authors detail the trajectory of women's growing exclusion and identify the largely informal avenues through which they are productively channelling their political activism, focusing in particular on gendered forms of association.

How do residents of the Middle East's largest slums resolve local disputese Slum areas, squatter settlements and other "informal" neighborhoods often exist outside of effective state authority, leaving residents to develop parallel, informal forms of legality. This is particularly true for female residents of Middle Eastern slums who may feel marginalized from channels of dispute resolution for reasons related to gender as well as geography and socioeconomic status. This paper examines strategies of conflict resolution employed by low-income women in the slums of Cairo and Istanbul - the region's largest megacities. Using an original survey of 1,800 female slum dwellers in three neighborhoods and more detailed data gleaned from a series of focus groups of the same populations, we examine the sorts of remedies poor women use to solve everyday disputes. In particular, we distinguish between the types of issues that are typically taken to court; resolved through the use of mediators; handled by the woman herself; or left unresolved. We further examine if the development of alternative legal channels poses a challenge for the social power of elites and for the state. This is particularly important as bureaucrats, party leaders, and Islamic activists each have a political incentive to serve as mediators for interpersonal disputes and for enforcing social control in these neighborhoods. This research speaks to the literature in law and society on legal consciousness (Merry 1990; Ewick and Silbey 1998; Nielsen 2004) and legal mobilization (Galanter 1974, Zemans 1983, McCann 1994, Epp 1998), which offer ideational and resource based explanations, respectively, of when and why individuals use courts in settling disputes and seeking justice. At the same time, we situate the analysis of dispute resolution in the broader literature on social capital and informal networks in the urban slums of the Middle East.

Recent decades have witnessed a devolution of policymaking authority in Egypt to particular interest hierarchies, most prominently in areas unrelated to internal security and foreign affairs. One area where the state has relinquished some of its historic decisional and implementation responsibility has been in the area of economic policy where members of the private sector elite have increasingly used their informal relationships with the state to influence government policy. This project seeks to examine the institutionalization of this informal relationship by focusing on the emergence of privatist corporatism in Egypt. According to O'Donnell (1977), privatist corporatism opens certain policy domains to the representation of specific interests of the co-opted sectors. The relationship between the state and the business elite in privatist corporatism is a symbiotic one in which the state enjoys the support of the private sector and depends on business elite to set and implement state policy. Through this mutual dependence, the co-opted businessmen are granted certain rights and privileges and at the same time the state is guaranteed that these businessmen choose not to operate independent of state channels. This project seeks to explain why Egypt witnessed a retreat in the role of the state in setting economic policy in favor of policymaking by co-opted businessmen. In order to answer this question, I use elite interviews with representatives the private sector and state from both the contemporary and historical period. I also examine the archives of Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, Al-Ahram Weekly and Al-Masry Al-Youm. Cases considered include a discussion of Ahmed Ezz a steel magnate and a leading member in the ruling party who has pushed through legislation that enhanced his steel monopoly. I also examine the case of Khairat al-Shater - a Muslim Brotherhood leader tried before a military court for money laundering despite the fact that the prosecution lacked evidence for the claim. I argue that businessmen who are part of the privatist corporatist system are able to influence policy making, while businessmen affiliated with the opposition are persecuted by the regime.

In her analysis of women's legal strategies in the Middle East, Annelies Moors observes that "...women's legal claims may not coincide with what they expect to gain when they turn to court" (1990:160). Legal documents may aid litigants in achieving goals beyond or even contrary to their articulated purpose. This observation is borne out in my analysis of litigant strategies in Port Said, Egypt and uses of various legal documents including police reports, commercial documents, and marriage contracts. In particular, this paper considers how one type of commercial document, the 'honesty receipt,' is deployed to obscure the true subject of disputes and agreements related to marriage and betrothal. Honesty receipts enhance surety because, although they are intended as legal fictions, they bear potential misdemeanor charges for breach of trust. This allows litigants to make determinations about how the law shall adjudicate their problems. In the context of disputes over Muslim marriage contracts, either related to broken betrothal or to fulfillment of the terms of contracts, it is also possible to suggest that women in particular use honesty receipts to bolster their negotiating power. Scholars have noted that in the Middle East and North Africa, women are encouraged to view their rights as embedded in kin and community networks. As such, the circuitous deployment of legal documents to secure marriage agreements must be understood in the broader context of women's citizenship rights and the particular legal and social perils of betrothal. Hence, contemporary surety practices in Port Said are linked both to gender-based power differentials (reinforced by the gendered implementation of state services such as policing and social welfare) as well as to urbanization and socio-economic shifts that have made marriage negotiations increasingly attenuated. This paper is based on ethnographic research in Port Said undertaken in 2005 and 2007. It takes as a starting point a recent case from Port Said, but draws upon related data from Egypt as well as analysis of legal personhood and subjectivity in the Middle East in order to examine the intersections between legal documents and social relations.