Tunisia after the Uprising: Islamist and Secular Quests for Women's Rights

Gray, Doris H.

doi:10.1080/13629395.2012.725298

Cited by 60 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…After years of imprisonment with the most marginalized women of Tunisian society, Islamist activist Ben Romdhane emphasizes the importance of compassion with those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who had resorted to crimes due to poverty, lack of education or unfortunate family circumstances. This differs from the attitude of some of her more conservative Islamist peers who for instance condemn single motherhood (Gray 2012). In line with this, her activism is centred around social justice advocacy.…”

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 92%

“…However, in exchange for this support secular/feminist women's movements were curbed in their opportunities to criticize the regime, and increasingly considered to be complicit in the regime's oppression of the Islamist movement and particularly Islamist women (Gray 2012 What should be noted is that Tunisia's emerging Islamist women's movement is not homogeneous, and that even within Ennahda women have expressed various views in relation to women's position in Tunisian society (Gray 2012). After years of imprisonment with the most marginalized women of Tunisian society, Islamist activist Ben Romdhane emphasizes the importance of compassion with those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who had resorted to crimes due to poverty, lack of education or unfortunate family circumstances.…”

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, Islamist women's activists and groups share a strong commitment to pursuing recognition and accountability for past injustices. Whereas under Ben Ali most of the prisoners were men, politically active Islamist women were also captured, and Islamist women had to bear the brunt of the regime's repression resulting in economic deprivation and psychological trauma (Gray 2012). Furthermore, Tunisia's TDC has received thousands of testimonies in relation to sexual abuse in relation to a wide range of encounters with the state security apparatus by predominantly Islamist women 6 .…”

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In some cases it was even complicit in his abuse of other constituencies, particularly Islamist women (Gray 2012). Studying the relationship between the EU and Islamist women's groups could therefore give us a better understanding of the European adoption of the principles of the fourth wave of transitional justice.…”

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

North Africa and the Making of Europe : Governance, Institutions and Culture

Davis¹,

Serres²,

Brunet³

et al. 2018

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Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tunisia In Transition: National Identity Transitional Justimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

North Africa and the Making of Europe : Governance, Institutions and Culture

Davis¹,

Serres²,

Brunet³

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In addition, Islamic women deemed members of 'unrecognized organizations' faced arbitrary imprisonment, and sometimes even rape and torture. 71 Another issue that drew much support from Islamic women's rights groups was economic empowerment schemes for women, with a particular focus on rural women. Islamic women's rights activists were often working in more traditional communities, and habitually in Southern Tunisia, where women's rights issues had a harder time gaining traction than in the relatively wealthy northern and more urban Tunisia.…”

Section: Sacred Rights Claiming As Claims To the Universalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of universal rights claiming: Secular and sacred rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Borg

2017

Rev. Int. Stud.

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This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse as a way of making a claim to social change through appealing to a universal and illustrates such an understanding with the contestation over women’s rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. To develop this argument, the article draws on Jacques Rancière’s notion of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau’s engagement with the relation between the universal and the particular. To examine the relevance of such conceptualisation, the article turns to the struggle over women’s rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where secular and sacred understandings of the universal have been invoked frequently through rights discourse. In this context it is shown that claims to the universal give rhetorical force to rights discourse, and instead of depoliticising social relations, which rights discourse is often charged with, such claims are vital for political efficacy. However, whereas Laclau’s position helps us to understand rights as a language of resistance, a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. To pursue this argument, the article turns to Rancière’s defence of axiomatic equality.

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Empowering Young Women? Gender and Youth Quotas in Tunisia

Belschner

2019

Double-Edged Politics on Women’s Rights in the MENA Region

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This cumulative PhD dissertation studies the political inclusion of young men and women in democratic and democratizing states. It compares three aspects of political inclusion on the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis: quotas, parties, and elections. The articles in the dissertation ask where and why states adopt quotas for youth, how parties implement the regulations, and how young candidates' age impacts their electoral performance. With its focus on youth, the dissertation explores the under-representation of a group that has, so far, received little scholarly attention. While existing research has focused on describing and explaining cross-national patterns of political youth representation, this dissertation aims to unpack processes and factors leading to representational outcomes. It does so by focusing on the entry and inclusion of youth into politics, which, arguably, precede and condition their descriptive representation. The dissertation as a whole builds on and contributes to the literatures of gender & politics, political parties, and electoral studies. It is composed of five independent articles, of which two are published in peer-reviewed journals and an edited volume, and three are currently under review. The first article, "The adoption of youth quotas after the Arab uprisings", was published in Politics, Groups, and Identities and compares the actors and processes leading to the adoption of gender and youth quotas in Tunisia and Morocco (Belschner 2018). The second article, "Hierarchies of Representation: The Re-distributive Effects of Gender and Youth Quotas", co-authored with Marta Garcia de Paredes, is in the second round of R&R at Representation and explores the intersectional effects of paired gender and youth quotas cross-nationally and in three case-studies of Tunisia, Morocco, and Sweden. The third article, "Empowering Young Women? Gender and Youth Quotas in Tunisia", was published in Darhour and Dahlerup 2020 and investigates the backgrounds of young female MPs and their positions in the Tunisian parliament (Belschner 2020). The fourth article, "Electoral Engineering in New Democracies. Parties, Quotas, and Institutional Uncertainty" is currently under review. It focuses on Tunisian local elections and asks under what conditions parties are willing and able to comply with quotas for multiple groups. The fifth article, "Youth Advantage vs. Gender Penalty: Selecting and Electing Young Candidates" is under review as well and analyses the conditions for young candidates' electoral success in Irish local elections. Theoretically, methodically, and empirically, all articles stand on their own. To varying degrees, they all employ quantitative as well as qualitative data and while some are classical (comparative) case-studies, others take a cross-national perspective to address the above-mentioned research questions. Geographywise, the articles focus on North Africa, particularly Tunisia, and Western Europe, particularly Ireland. Tunisia is one of the few countries that has legislated yo...

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Tunisia after the Uprising: Islamist and Secular Quests for Women's Rights

Cited by 60 publications

References 0 publications

North Africa and the Making of Europe : Governance, Institutions and Culture

North Africa and the Making of Europe : Governance, Institutions and Culture

The politics of universal rights claiming: Secular and sacred rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Empowering Young Women? Gender and Youth Quotas in Tunisia

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