Women’s ‘Political Empowerment’ in the Arab World

 

This Horizons Commentary is the opening blog post for a new portfolio on Women and Democratic Sustainability in MENA. The article explores the international dimensions of women’s political participation.

Layla Saleh

August 4, 2024

Women in Gaza, November 2023 (Source: UN Women)

How does women’s political empowerment fit in with the international assistance agenda for democratization in the Arab world? What local alternatives exist for ensuring and deepening women’s varied roles in bottom-up struggles towards democratic sustainability?

Women across the Global South, the Arab region included, have in recent decades increasingly become target beneficiaries and constituencies of assistance models and policies in the Western-led infrastructure of global governance. The European Union’s ‘Women and Youth in Democracy Initiative’ (WYDE) announced in 2023 and ‘feminist foreign policies’ rooted in the UN Women, Peace and Security Agenda are some prominent examples. The emphasis on enhancing women’s political leadership roles and broader political and civic participation is a cornerstone of international democracy assistance, peacebuilding work, (neoliberal) economic reforms, and even efforts toward socio-cultural normative change.

As Arab civil societies and publics continue to struggle for freedom, dignity, social justice, a number of questions come to the fore in considerations of long-standing (Orientalist) preoccupations with women. Attempts at political reform and democratic change in the age of the Arab Spring and its aftermath have recharged this interest. This blog explores some of the tensions inherent in the contradictions of international assistance policies on the one hand, and the real and urgent imperative for facilitating and expanding women’s civic and political contributions in the Arab region, on the other.

Empowering Women for Democracy

Among the most pointed trends in international democracy assistance over the past three decades has been the clear turn to women’s political empowerment. This is the phenomenon that Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann explore in a new book, Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics. International bodies (UN Women, the Inter-Parliamentary Union) and bodies associated with foreign ministries (USAID, the National Democratic Institute, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Netherlands Institute for Multi-Party Democracy) have spent billions of dollars on the issue. Their innumerable programs support and train women political candidates, parliamentarians, voters, and civil society leaders. One issue that emerges in the book is of particular relevance for the Arab region. Enhanced gender equality in formal politics (parliaments, political parties, municipal governments, etc.) is not necessarily synonymous with democracy or democratization.

This take-away reinforces findings from earlier research that show how elite-level reforms focusing on quantitative indicators of women’s representation can neglect related problems. Here socio-economic inequalities or centralized governance, which also shape the contours of women’s limited political involvement, remain untouched. Moreover, ‘autocratic co-optation’ of such policies means that they might only nominally level the playing field for women. Instead, quotas for women in parliaments and ministries, gender political parity laws, and anti-discrimination legislation—all policies encouraged by ‘women’s political empowerment’ assistance—may be in fact be used to mask autocratization or democratic backsliding. Dictators may enact ‘empowerment’ measures for the purposes of increasing both international and domestic legitimacy. Such reforms can be seen as generally unthreatening to state monopolization of power. Morocco (24.3% women parliamentarians) and Egypt (27.7% women parliamentarians) are just two Arab examples.

Such findings on the pitfalls of international aid for propelling women into political roles confirms abundant scholarship on both democracy assistance and gender politics. Scholars, activists, and citizens of Arab states have observed ‘state feminism’ for decades. From Algeria to Syria, Tunisia to Egypt, postcolonial Arab autocrats have from independence and since enacted (some) women-friendly policies in education and the workplace. Legal reforms expanding women’s rights (e.g. personal status laws) were also at least in part attempts to legitimate their single-man or single-party rule while alienating political rivals.

So what, then, is new? The integration of international assistance, policy prescriptions, and associated diplomatic kudos into cosmetically ‘inclusive’ reforms by Arab dictators is a relatively recent development. It is no coincidence that many such authoritarian leaders are propped up by international financial and military assistance (e.g. IMF loans, EU aid to curb migration) as Western-dependent regimes. This phenomenon only deepens the democratic challenge for societies mired in economic misery and political disempowerment.

What Empowerment?

Empirical research on the snags of international assistance for democracy and for women’s political empowerment, then, raises some red flags. It points to what may be uncomfortable problems for aid bureaucracies and even some international non-governmental organizations that mediate much of this programming and aid. For those individuals and groups pursuing democratic sustainability, there are some overarching concerns. To what extent does the international donor emphasis on women’s political participation and leadership substantively nudge polities and societies in the direction of democratic sustainability? Does international assistance geared at empowering women strengthen the capacity of Arab states and societies to construct, adopt, and reproduce values, practices, and institutions that help ensure freedom, dignity, equality, and social justice for all citizens?

Women’s active participation and leadership are crucial for any meaningful democratization to take place, anywhere. That is a given. As postcolonial Global South settings whose peoples are still struggling for emancipation even decades after formal independence, Arab countries face overwhelming problems. Occupation and genocide (Palestine) to armed conflict (Libya, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) to failing economies (Lebanon, Tunisia) to dictatorship (all around) come to mind. The last thing Arab publics need is for their intellectual, civic, and political elites to trade the public visibility of women for meaningful expansion of inclusiveness, participation, and equality among all citizens. Appointing female ambassadors, ministers, parliamentarians, and mayors may or may not be effective in transforming, from above, aspects of a society’s political culture towards greater inclusiveness of women. It is not, however, a substitute for democratic sustainability or even socio-economic development. ‘Gender mainstreaming’ of dictatorships serves only autocrats and their client networks while matching discourses of Western ‘allies.’

Hence, one challenge in the Arab world is to insist on the substantive aims of women’s civic and political participation. That is, to avoid the trap of abstracting women’s civic engagement and political presence from its democratic significance and associated values. Widening inclusiveness to incorporate all of the demos; civic engagement; and advocacy for issues of social justice, from regional (in)equality to education, are examples of non-negotiable, values-based practices much deeper than the number of women policymakers in regimes heaving under the weight of authoritarianism. The expression and manifestation of these civic policies must in turn be grounded in popular sovereignty and self-determination. Such local ‘conditionality’ should apply whether in settings of occupation, (multiple) internationalized wars, or economic and political dependency on Western imperialist powers from the US to the EU.

Who Empowers?

Perhaps a question more basic than the content of empowerment concerns the basis of ‘empowerment’ itself. Who is empowering whom, and why? Programs aimed at women’s political empowerment, although they are directed at the Global South more broadly, must be read in a regional context of Orientalist knowledge and imperialist interference in the Arab and Muslim world. Muslim (or Arab) women are constantly being ‘saved’ by Western powers with colonial or militarist aims: Lila Abu-Lughod’s formulation has not grown old. Charged with extra momentum since the Arab Spring propelled women across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and other settings into the (Western) media limelight, women’s political empowerment may just be among the latest iterations of such rescue.

Critique of international and Western aid and assistance policies is not enough, however. True, democratic backsliding or ‘degenerations’ have taken hold across the Arab geography. Yet there always exist (past and present) margins for challenging authoritarianism. Top down, international-local assistance suffers from indisputable inconsistencies and problems. What other areas might be notable as sites of women’s experiences and gains, relevant to democratic sustainability? Inversely, what obstacles or challenges confront women’s political participation? Violent conflict, socio-economic marginalization, institutional constraints, insecurities in public space, hostile media environments: the list is long.

At issue is that neither gains nor barriers facing women should follow cookie-cutter assumptions and prescriptions. Instead, they must be unearthed from within, based on local narratives and interpretations of events and experiences. By many global metrics including the Global Gender Gap, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) lags behind almost all regions of the world when it comes to indicators such as gender parity in economics, education, health, and politics. Quantitative benchmarks—of either progress or relative backwardness—do not, however, tell the full story. A sole reliance on such numbers without ‘grounded’ knowledge may (and does) invite external tutelage.

This is not to discount the electoral and partisan or parliamentary advancements of women, for instance in Tunisia with its longest democratic experiment. Women’s experiences in parliament, political parties, and local government are important to document and analyze for the ‘lessons’ they teach about democratic learning and unlearning. The point is that an electoral focus on formal politics is insufficient, as any critical conception of democracy and democratization will assert. That is one shortcoming of many accounts of women vis-a-vis democracy, often echoing if not derived from Western policies of aid-for-empowerment.

Egypt Parliamentary Elections, Dec. 2011 (Source: UN Women)

(Women’s) Democratic Knowledge

Because the institutional dimension remains limited, a lens directed at the democracy assistance community is incomplete. Investigating and encouraging democratic knowledge that centers women’s (and men’s) civic and public roles, both historical and contemporary, is part of an ongoing project of counter-knowledge that seeks to rebut Orientalist narratives. That women were at the vanguard of the Arab Spring uprisings and revolutions is a phenomenon few can forget. More practically and politically impactful, exploring and fortifying such democratic knowledge can also help generate collective and comparative brainstorming for problem-solving and innovation. There is a pressing need to maintain and enhance women’s substantive civic engagement and political participation. Recalling and reframing women’s roles in anticolonial nationalist and postcolonial anti-authoritarian movements, for instance, can help re-establish the historical and cultural pedigree of women’s involvement in public life and politics.

Doing so may help Arab activists and intellectuals reclaim declared interest in women’s civic and political participation from its ‘missionary feminism’ lineage and manifestations. Deepening understandings of local democratic knowledge can also increase the leverage of women activists themselves (some who identify as feminists, others not) and of women’s civil society groups (both grassroots and formally registered organizations) as they interact with democracy assistance actors and programs. Learning does not have to be just uni-directional and top-down. The presumption that actors including USAID, the National Democratic Institute, Multi-Party Democracy Institutes should ‘lecture’ eager and pliant Arab masses of women can be challenged. A localized approach to both theoretical and experiential democratic knowledge is thus indispensable. It can bolster Arab civil society’s inputs vis-à-vis international donors in setting agendas, designing programs, and evaluating outcomes relating to women’s political empowerment—or any other objective.

Hence, it is vital for activists, intellectuals, and civic and political groupings across the Arab world to pool their memories, their expertise, their networks, and their resources both tangible and intangible. Only thus can we find common ground, engaging in knowledge-transfer to systematically uncover and discover what has worked and what has not worked. Over a decade after the Arab Spring’s eruption, there is much damage to assess but also many gains to salvage and build on. Rooting women’s political empowerment here, in the larger enterprise of bottom-up, indigenously propelled democratic sustainability, can be one guarantee to longevity and persistent advancement.

The Arab region and its peoples are beset by political and socio-economic ills too numerous to count, from violent conflict to democratic stagnation to economic catastrophes. It is no surprise that the menu of Western/international democracy assistance programs, protocols, and proclamations have been stripped of credibility. The same might be said of grand designs for women’s political empowerment. Current events are telling in this regard. How can European countries or the US ‘empower’ Arab women as their 500- or 2000-pound bombs pound the women, children, and men of Gaza?

Such a contradiction is more than simply a mismatch between diplomatic positions and development bureaucracies. Programs and policies underlain by normative principles (political equality of women as active citizens) are tainted by immoral stances that orchestrate occupation (Iraq, Syria, Yemen) or support if not take part in genocidal wars (Palestine). Just as Arab democracy will not come from outside powers, neither will women’s political empowerment. It was not international aid agencies who kicked off the Arab Spring in which women revolted against dictatorship alongside men. It will not be international aid agencies led by the US, or any of its EU allies, who safeguard women’s political and socio-economic rights or strengthen their participation in building and maintaining sustainable democracy.