This project examines the role of international organizations as tools versus agents for women’s economic empowerment in Lebanon. Leveraging Blowfield’s (2012) distinction between development tools versus development agents, as well as feminist approaches to relational analysis (Nussbaum et al., 2012; Metcalfe, 2011), we are interested in exploring how international organizations’ financial awards take shape (i.e., concrete examples), function (i.e., how they work), and play out (i.e., the consequences) in the context of local multi-stakeholder mobilizing. Through a case-based analysis of a 2-year U.S. Department of State-funded project, The Knowledge is Power or KIP Project, we explore the narratives of local multi-stakeholder organizers around economic empowerment of women. A central question concerns how funding efforts to support and broaden opportunities for female economic empowerment are perceived by various actors on the ground. How is knowledge coproduced and shaped (reshapes) by the different stakeholders? Centralizing these questions, we analyze transcripts that capture indigenous voices of multiple, local, multi-sector activists and organizers debating and discussing economic empowerment of women in Lebanon. Engaging in an iterative qualitative analysis guided by the Gioia Method (Corley and Gioia, 2004; Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2013), we begin with an inductive (i.e., 1st-order coding capturing the participants language and key notions) and then interpretive (i.e., 2nd-order axial coding capturing relationships among these categories and vis-à-vis our central theoretical frameworks) approach to the data. Our results suggest that such awards can serve as a facilitating tool for localized coproduction and sharing of knowledge and practices. We also argue that adopting a multistakeholder starting point facilitates the coproduce of hybrid and polyvalent feminist knowledge surrounding women’s economic empowerment. We reflect on these results in relation to the Business Case for Economic Empowerment, often even adopted by international organizations themselves (Chant, 2013). That is, in relation to the criticisms against supporting women’s economic empowerment increasingly positioned within neoliberal frameworks (Eisenstein, 2005). Such frameworks asserts that an investment in women is important because it creates new forms of business and it raises national/global economic productivity (Moser 1993). Although we acknowledge such cautionary notes, we focus explicitly on the generative instances of such mobilizing for local change. Stepping away from the specific narratives, we explore further for patterns and interconnectedness, searching specifically for variations in the neoliberal economic logics embedded within feminist narratives and for coproduced forms that involve hybrid, mutated and radicalized logics. Our results demonstrate manifestations of generative organizing.

The October 17, 2019 “Revolution” changed everything in Lebanon. Even though the sectarian system is still in place and the political elites in power, the barrier of fear and blind allegiance has been broken. Most sectors of Lebanese society rose up in defiance of the status quo, from all religions, districts, and socio-economic backgrounds. And the women took the lead, from marching to barricading to mobilizing to activating. As the Lebanese called for reform, accountability, anti-corruption, and justice, issues related to women’s rights climbed to the fore. My presentation will focus on the role of a university in the Arab Middle East during times of social upheaval, and the critical importance of international funding to foreground gender equity in the strive for democratization in the region. The Lebanese American University has actively sought international funding over the years to strengthen educational, community engagement, internship and activism programming across Lebanon and the MENA region, programming that has specifically addressed and impacted the economic, political and social status of women. The MEPI Tomorrow’s Leaders Undergraduate and Graduate grants, for example, provide full scholarships for MENA students to pursue degrees in multiple programs, including Gender Studies. Each of the academic programs is required to include coursework, experiential learning and capstone projects that address gender issues. The USAID scholarship program (USP and HES) primarily for public school students, including refugees, has benefitted females at almost twice the rate of males. LAU’s Arab Institute for Women, AiW, actively seeks funding from UN Agencies, USAID, MEPI, foreign embassies and the EU to support gender-related projects in the region, including in women’s prisons, with domestic workers, and gender-based violence training for law enforcement personnel. Without international resources to amplify women’s agency, only a fraction of what has been achieved would have been possible. Moreover during these critical times when so many are rising up against religious patriarchy and sectarian elitism, the time is right to invest in the most pressing movement of our era, that of gender equity in the MENA region.

Almost 300 new women’s associations emerged following the 2010-2011 Revolution in Tunisia. While many of them disappeared over time, some survived the political transition. How did new women’s associations survive after the political revolution in Tunisia? I draw on content analysis, fieldwork, 79 interviews conducted in Tunisia and Washington D.C. in 2018 and 2019 with members and leaders two associations, Tunisian officials, and foreign donors and implementers. The article develops a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics between foreign donors and local women’s associations during political transitions. More specifically, it shows how two local women’s associations—secular feminist Ligue Des Electrices Tunissiennes (LET) and Islamist Tounissiet—were not simply passive recipients of foreign aid. On the contrary, they judiciously used foreign donor assistance to (1) professionalize and (2) specialize, which helped them survive during the political transition. I suggest that more needs to be understood about the role of donor assistance when examining social movement survival, especially in political transitions.

Foreign aid historically has severed numerous purposes, from safeguarding national security interests to supporting development efforts and providing humanitarian relief. But donors’ purposes in providing aid and beneficiaries’ perceptions of why aid is given are not always aligned. Furthermore, beneficiaries’ perceptions are not uniform across all citizens in one country, and variation in these perceptions have plausible links to attitudes on gender egalitarianism norms more generally. Using data from the latest wave of the Arab Barometer, this paper investigates how perceptions towards foreign aid vary by gender across countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Preliminary data suggests, for example, that while there is no difference between men and women in naming the goal of improving the lives of ordinary citizens as one motivation for Western countries to give foreign aid, higher shares of women than men suggest it is the main motivation for giving aid. Such differences—and similarities—between men and women’s perceptions on the main motivations of foreign aid potentially speaks to the extent to which foreign assistance programs have succeeded in increasing women’s political and economic empowerment in the region.