This paper examines three women’s films that are focused on documenting experiences of violence and trauma in modern Algeria, a country that has been the site of violence over different periods. Through their female protagonists, films such as Yamina Bachir’s Rachida (2002), and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat (2006) and Yema (2012) represent the traumatic events in Algeria during the civil war in the 1990’s and their effects on women. Like their cinematic predecessor The Battle of Algiers (1966), these films respond to and attempt to manage traumas specific to a historical moment. Both Yamina Bachir and Djamila Sahraoui use cinematic techniques to highlight their female protagonists' constant anxiety about the chaos enveloping Algeria. Drawing on Judith Butler’s books Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004),and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? this paper interrogates the female protagonists’ fortitude as well as their precarious position in the face of terrorism. While the films highlight women’s crucial roles within the community, they depict men as powerless. I will show how women’s precarious situation in the films is caused not just by terrorism but also by men’s lack of masculinity. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s book Male Subjectivity at the Margins, the paper further highlights how in all three films, masculine flaws and vulnerabilities are openly exposed rather than being concealed. The structuring use of the camera also includes the process of using woman-ness as a potentially liberating force from the violence. Women’s “becoming” in the films allows them to recover from the violence, resisting narratives of chaos. Luce Irigaray explains this notion of becoming in terms of the formation and transformation of women’s identity. The paper will thus raise questions concerning not only suffering, trauma, and violence, but also men’s wounded masculinities as well as women’s vulnerability and resistance.

The OECD defines social capital as “networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate co-operation within or among groups”. Social Capital is a concept that is getting highly popularized in recent years through its use by the OECD and the World Bank. Its utilization marks a significant shift for the analysis on social cohesion from a macro-level perspective to individual and community levels of analysis. In this paper, I explore how social capital perpetuate and reinforce refugees’ capability to expand their agency, meaning ability to choose different ways of living. The target group of the study is the young female refugees aged between 18 and 30 who fled the civil war in Syria and moved to Istanbul in the last 3 years. The focus is placed on refugee women living in urban environment rather than camps, because I explore young refugee’s social, economic and political choices in an urban settlement, which necessitates the application of long term or even durable policies. Thus, the Capability Approach is used as a metric and a lens through which I can underlay the conditions that enable individuals to promote collective action, instead of outcome oriented frameworks that analyse individuals as mere receivers. I gathered data through extensive survey with the refugee women themselves and conducted in-depth interviews both with the refugees and the academics and humanitarian workers who are working closely with the refugee women. Accordingly, the paper is designed in three parts: First, I analyse if there is an enabling environment for young refugee women to develop their own form of social capital. To do that I examine the means and the ways refugee women gather information regarding daily life affairs, market conditions and public services, patterns of social inclusion and exclusion in everyday forms of interaction (particularly in public services) and if they hold any power to influence the institutions that affect their welfare. Then in the second part, I analyse, given the circumstances, can young refugee women form social capital and in what forms by looking at their participation into social organisations including informal groups, trust levels (interpersonal and to institutions) and their ability to have say over the legal infrastructure that affects their lives. Finally, I seek to explain in what ways capability or incapability to form social capital expands refugee women’s agency in terms of integration into host community, access to work opportunities and public services etc.

Studies of resistance have found that nonviolent actions tend to attract a broader base of participants than violent actions, and this has historically been the case for the Palestinian resistance movement. Nonviolent resistance actions have long been practised by Palestinian women, in particular, who have played significant roles sustaining active periods of popular resistance. However, in the post-Oslo period, despite some notable exceptions, women have largely been absent from collective resistance actions. By examining Palestinian women’s perceptions of popular resistance activities in the West Bank gleaned from in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with 54 participants from the Bethlehem Governorate, this paper investigates factors that may be contributing to women’s retreat from collective activism. While some accounts attribute the post-Oslo demobilisation of Palestinian resistance to widespread apathy, this paper argues that Palestinian women remain highly committed to the struggle to resist Israeli occupation, but have been alienated from prevailing forms of popular activism such as protests and demonstrations. Discussions with women revealed that distrust of the actors, agendas, and interests driving such actions led many to question their legitimacy. Indeed, interviewees regularly explained their own and other women's lack of engagement in popular protests and demonstrations by attesting to factors that, in their estimation, reduced their legitimacy. The issue of legitimacy is particularly pivotal for women who are constrained in a greater number of ways than men when it comes to public forms of resistance participation. As such, they place a relatively higher premium on legitimacy than do men in such decisions. By analysing the performance of resistance as a ‘moral drama’, in which actors are expected to be acting authentically and not out of self interest in the pursuit of a moral or social cause, I posit that the legitimacy of a resistance action in Palestine is evaluated primarily on the basis of how ‘pure’ the motives of activists are perceived to be, and how authentic (i.e. free of outside interference) it is. This analysis contributes an understanding of why contemporary collective resistance actions in Palestine have largely failed to sustain women’s participation, and why Palestinian women perceive there to be so few avenues of ‘real’ resistance left for them to pursue.

This paper is an ethnographic study of Murabitiyyn and Murabitat (female) activists in Jerusalem who see themselves as the guardians of Al-Aqsa Mosque, protecting it from Jewish individuals and groups who seek to change the status quo on the site. I argue that these activists have combined the symbolic power of sacred space with innovative religious practice and discourse to redefine the opportunities and limitations of Palestinian political agency on the Holy Esplanade. I focus on the practices of masatib al-‘ilm (learning circles) and takbiyr (saying ‘Allahu Akbar’) as they are used within and around the mosque. I investigate the theological, historical, and ethical discourses Murabitiyyn and Murabitat utilize to articulate their activism. By their presence, their voices, and their bodies, the Murabitiyyn - and specifically Murabitat - have transformed the conflict by galvanizing mass public support for the protection of Al-Aqsa mosque in the wave of unrest which hit Jerusalem in the fall of 2015. Within Palestinian society itself, they have altered traditional paradigms of Palestinian nationalism by pioneering new terminology - Ribat (or guardianship) - to articulate their ideological motivation for resisting Israel and remaining in Jerusalem. The female Murabitat have also transformed women’s political agency within Palestinian society. Historically, women have played a significant yet limited role in the national project. Today, however, as one Palestinian put it: “[The] Murabitat are pioneers and heroes - the new virgins of the Palestinian resistance” (East Jerusalem, 2015). By taking this leading role, the Murabitat have reconfigured gender relations in Palestine and opened new horizons of political agency for women within an Islamic framework. This study is based on ethnographic data collected in Jerusalem between 2013 and 2015. I conducted ethnographic interviews with Murabitiyyn and Murabitat activists and Jerusalemites more broadly. I engaged in extensive participant observation at al-Aqsa mosque and reviewed social media sites such as Facebook and Youtube which dealt with the issue directly. My analysis is located at the nexus of three broad and interconnected lines of academic inquiry: the anthropology of Islam, female activism in Islamic contexts and Palestinian nationalism.