The extant scholarship on women’s participation in armed Palestinian popular resistance groups (fid?’? organizations) remains primarily limited to political and anthropological studies of women in the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) and largely glosses over their role in groups further to the political left like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Anthropologists like Rosemary Sayigh, Julie Peteet, and Amalia Sa‘ar have contributed greatly to our understanding of Fatah’s institutional mobilization of women, primarily through the vehicle of the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), established in 1965. Their research has rightly centered on Palestinian women’s agency in the social revolution that accompanied the ascendance of Fatah in the aftermath of the June 1967 War and has explored the ways in which these women used collective organizing, passive steadfast resistance (?um?d), and writing to shape Fatah’s social platforms. Yet the accounts of these scholars and the memoirs of Fatah members also reveal that the party’s leadership, including Yasser Arafat, placed limits on the power of women in the party, particularly concerning access to weapons and military training, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In contrast, the Marxist-Leninist PFLP viewed women’s involvement in armed struggle during the same period as vital to its proletarian revolution. Drawing on articles from the PFLP’s Arabic monthly magazine, al-Hadaf, and other party pamphlets and bulletins, my paper seeks to demonstrate how the PFLP’s social and military platforms afforded women a more central role as fid?’iyy?t than their counterparts in Fatah. Furthermore, my study complicates the traditional critique of revolutionary Arab Marxism during this period, which claims that Arab leftists ignored feminist issues or treated them as subservient to class struggle. I instead argue that the PFLP leadership, including George Habash, Leila Khalid, and Ghassan Kanafani, were actively engaged in global discussions about the intersection of gender and class issues as interlocutors that contributed to, and not only consumed, Marxist-Leninist theory.

The paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship on women in Saudi Arabia through the case of female football players in Riyadh. Officially, there has been no women’s football in the conservative kingdom. Under the surface however, women have been playing for more than a decade. The women are actively promoting, and engaging in social change and specifically women’s opportunities to practice sport by building organization, creating awareness and negotiating norms and regulations. They are not in opposition to the regime, but supportive of reforms in favour of increased rights for women, while seeing conservative elements in the society as their opponents and the royal family as their allies. They are thus engaging in what O’Brian and Li has termed “rightful resistance” by deploying the language of the rulers to express their perspectives and aims, and are engaged in a three party-game with the rulers and conservatives, where divisions within the state and elite allies mattered greatly. Instead of taking substantial risks, Riyadh’s female footballers have reacted to backlash by finding new ways. They have focused at promoting awareness and normalizing women’s football, building organization, developing talent and creating opportunities that was not there before. They have developed their tactics in order to fight for the right to play without provoking reactions that could result in setbacks. This has resulted in a strong network of knowledgeable and dedicated women, who has restructured their communities and influenced decision makers. Their skills are now being appreciated by the rulers, who are implementing their views in the new policies promoting women’s sports. The women of Riyadh’s Female Football League are rightful resistors loyal to the rulers, adapting their logics in order to protest what they perceive as limiting attitudes from conservative parts of the state and society in Saudi Arabia. They are thus working within a system, rather than resisting it. In this they see the state as a benevolent patriarch who provides protection and opportunities. As such, they stand in contrast to the more confrontational, general rights-oriented networks that have faced brutal oppression in the era of decisiveness. This shows the need for a history of Saudi women that goes beyond a dichotomy of submissiveness and explicit resistance, but rather acknowledges agency including for those not acting in a confronting manner.

The online movement is a new subject of study in social sciences and especially social movements. Some more traditional scholars believe that online movements are not potent enough to mobilize individuals to act, but in the dictatorial contexts and societies where participating in the collective protest physically in the real world is impossible or at least very dangerous, online venues could be a new platform to protest without very harsh consequences for the participants. Since the Arab Spring, research on social movements has paid increasing attention to the role of social media in mobilizing protests, disrupting hierarchies in social movement organizations, and creating new spaces for collective action. In nondemocratic and culturally conservative contexts, studies have found that feminist contention has become extra-institutional, transnational, and increasing takes place on digital platforms. How do feminist movements develop activist identities and mobilize collective action online? This article examines how feminist activists utilize social media to protest the law requiring mandatory veiling in Iran. Unlike studies that focus on how social networks facilitate offline collective action, this article considers social media as both a communication tool and a space of protest. Part of a larger study on the online women’s rights movement, My Stealthy Freedom, this article analyzes the online campaign #WhiteWednesdays that appeals to followers to wear white headscarves to protest mandatory veiling. Through a content analysis of #WhiteWednesdays posts from 2015 to 2017, we find that the movement uses gendered frames to diagnose gender inequality, develop a collective identity of feminism, and connect online and offline protest behavior. We argue that organizers strategically use emotion to articulate tactics of nonviolent resistance in the context of gender oppression and redefine protest behavior in a networked society. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of what has been called “hashtag activism” and the future of feminist protest movements under authoritarian regimes.

Women’s rights (WR) have been increasingly seen not only as “Human Rights” but also as core components of democracy, which is notably about inclusion irrespective of citizens’ gender. Accordingly, WR have been mainstreamed in development projects but without much questioning about the universality of the various existing international WR conventions, such as CEDAW. Based on the case of Jordanian WR organizations and their cooperation with Western donors, our fieldgrounded paper challenges the universal meaning of WR. It argues that beyond a formally common language, stakeholders have different representations of WR-related norms, which often collide in the context of development projects. By drawing inspiration from Foucault’s “discourse analysis”, we show how Western “liberal” donors, by maintaining an unequal power relation with their Jordanian partners, dominate cooperation and “softly” constrain the WR vision in funded projects. Most importantly, the paper will analyze the reactions of Jordanian organizations and their members to this relationship and the resulting ‘imposed’ WR vision. We argue that Jordanian development actors are more than neutral service providers. Instead, they take the lead over their donors when it comes to the diffusion of WR norms on national and local levels. By reinterpreting, rephrasing/reframing, adapting and negotiating meanings, they develop resistance strategies that counterbalance power relations or bypass imposed visions. We will look more closely at these practices and resistance strategies to show how they influence projects’ implementation and outcomes as well as power relations and competing visions of WR while challenging the clear-cut opposition between liberal and illiberal norms and actors.