Panel 049, sponsored byAssociation of Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS), 2018 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 16 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
This panel builds on previous work on women's rights after the Arab Spring (e.g. Khalil 2014, Zvan-Elliott 2015, Sadiqi 2016, Shalaby and Moghadam 2016, Gray and Sonneveld 2018) or on youth (Khalaf and Saad 2012, Cole 2015, Momani 2015) to look at how women and youth have been affected by the regime responses to the demands raised by protestors. Despite the fact that both MENA individuals and civil society demonstrated their capacity to challenge regimes, political elites - both old and new - proved to be in control of the situation. A renewed building of alliances with such politically marginalized groups as youth and women enables these elites to not only weaken their opposition but also to monopolize the discourse on political reform and consolidate the survival of authoritarianism in the region. In addition, and as these papers will argue, important though only cosmetic reforms, such as setting up truth and reconciliation committees (Tunisia), instituting additional gender and youth quotas (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia), implementing legislation on violence against women (Tunisia and Morocco), have been used to manipulate domestic and international opinion and demands in assuming that democratization is indeed happening.
This panel seeks to address a set of questions that help us understand what has the impact of these reforms been on the wellbeing of youth and women. Have these reforms genuinely addressed and positively impacted youth employability and marriage prospects? How are these reforms addressing unabated gendered violence ? What kinds of relationships exist between youth marginality and violence in its different meanings? To what extent have different sets of reforms guaranteed citizens access to justice and dignity? This panel seeks to deal with these questions from political, socio-economic and legal perspectives by taking into consideration the actual voices of affected youth and women. Finally, the strength of these papers is in their ethnographic insight and thus they demonstrate an ability to connect state-centered analysis with grassroots experiences to show how post-2011 authoritarianism looks much the same as the pre-2011.
In early February 2018 Moroccan Upper House of Councilors approved Draft Law 103-13, a much awaited violence against women (VAW) law. Unfortunately and as women’s rights activists have been arguing all along, the bill falls well short of dealing with the needs of victims of such violence. That a much more comprehensive law is needed is demonstrated by a 2011 government report showing that six out of nine million women between the ages of 15 and 60 suffered from a form of gender-based violence. My own fieldwork (2015-2017) in a Listening Centre for victims of violence in a socio-economically depressed area just outside Meknes corroborates government statistics and further demonstrates how the existing Penal and Family Codes allow men to act with impunity, while failing to protect women victims, but also how inaccessibility of services and crumbling infrastructure, lack of proper training of medical, police, and legal staff, unemployment, and poverty all severely impact women’s experiences with violence.
Much of the literature on VAW in the region still focuses on cultural determinants of violence, attempting to either blame Islam or challenge this myth, and debating whether regional patriarchal culture or the rise of extremist Islamism are to blame for the worrying statistics on VAW. Though these debates are much needed, they conceive of the cause(s) as outside the parameters of a masculine, neoliberal, and bureaucratic state and its actors. Small-scale but intensive ethnographic fieldwork of VAW exposes how masculinization, neoliberalism, and bureaucratization all help consolidate state power, while increase the vulnerability of the already disenfranchised population and the impact of violence. While this research certainly cannot predict the future developments, let alone future popular revolutions in the region, it can contribute to our understanding of their underlying root causes.
This article aims to look at the relationship between different forms of marginalities and violence among the youth in the southern region of Morocco. It is based on a fieldwork conducted in the year 2016. It argues that marginality of young people could better be grasped if it is seen as the product of the complex interaction of different individual, community and societal factors. It is therefore important to analyze the structural factors that predispose and contribute to the feeling of marginality through a more holistic perspective. As the fieldwork shows, the marginality and violence of young people is multidimensional and this paper argues that heterogeneity of cases and the diversity of the trajectories of individuals reveal not only a strong feeling of marginality (hogra in Moroccan parlance) among the youth but also how violence is often experienced rather than perpetrated. Yet the experiences, daily lives and forms of resistance of young people are equally important in terms of understanding their agency which this paper seeks shed light on.
I argue most Arab countries have?adopted similar forms of state-feminism in an effort to respond to?pressures from grassroots civil-society organizations and from external actors. The latter include donor countries (mainly EU and USA) and international organizations (UN agencies, World Bank, IMF). This state feminism generally takes the form of gender quotas in elected bodies, the appointment of women to “soft” positions in the executive (cabinet), and legislation that seeks to advance women’s rights. While they all operate out of the same state-feminist playbook, these countries vary in the timing, motivation, and effectiveness of their women friendly policies. I divide Arab states into five categories, traditional monarchies, countries in transition, sectarian states, states with rentier economies, and conflict afflicted states. This paper will address rentier states.
In the MENA region, rentier states are those where political authority is strongly mediated through the exploitation of oil. These states have largely maintained a stable bargain in which support for the regime is significantly predicated upon economic prosperity. These rentier economies have used the money that comes from oil sales to uphold an implicit social contract with their populations whereby the needs of the population are taken care of from the “cradle to the grave,” and no taxation policy is imposed in exchange for political quiescence. In MENA, there are two types of rentier economies: monarchies and populist republics, the representational archetype of which are Saudi Arabia and Algeria. This paper aims to compare the approaches taken by both countries, and to show that these two very different political systems have nonetheless adopted similar approaches to the issue of women’s political rights, albeit at different speeds. The speeds are determined by the political, social and economic conditions the country is undergoing and by the responsiveness of the state to external and internal pressures for reform.
