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Gender paradoxes of the Arab Spring

The idea for this collected volume came out of an urgent need to focus on how women are impacting and being impacted by the on-going transformations in the Arab Spring geography. The events in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and across the region have been permeated by struggles related to women’s rights: gender politics (legislation, constitutional articles and transitional justice) and gender-based violence. However, serious discussions about gender equity have been sidelined by louder and on-going complications of transitional democracy, constitution drafting, elections and protracted questions of transitional justice. All of these aspects of democratic transition in North Africa have gender-related dimensions, yet these dimensions have been marginalised or recuperated by political agendas. As most of the contributors in this volume point out in their essays, gender-sensitive legislations (quotas, personal status codes, justice for female victims of state violence, etc.) have been discussed in ideological ways through the ‘state feminist’ discourses of the previous regimes as well as the governments that rose to power after the Arab Spring. The aim of the volume is to propose new lenses for thinking about gender, given the contemporary context, to provide a theoretical understanding of events that have occurred to women, and to make sense of the gender-political debates since the Arab Spring. The authors of this volume have tracked, measured and theorised women’s involvement in protest, debates about citizenship, constitution-writing and electoralism throughout the historic events of 2011–13 across North Africa. There are common themes that emerge from the essays and there is underlying consensus among its authors. Broadly speaking, the authors acknowledge that female activism has shifted sharply away from a situation in which state-sanctioned women’s associations were authorised to deal with the ‘woman question’ in North Africa and which were necessarily entangled with authoritarian governments. The authors of this volume agree that the state-serving ‘feminism’ of the nationalist, post-independence regimes lacked a real feminist agenda and exacerbated the difficult conditions of rural and poor women. The shift since the 14 January Tunisian revolution towards non-institutional activism on the streets and through cyber-space on Facebook, Twitter and blogging has de-centralised gender activism. In the context of the Arab Spring, popular pressures have been applied to the new governments by a wide range of groups of women whose opinions are redefining how constitutional and legal language treats gender in newly debated definitions of national identity. This shift in the women’s rights question from state-defined action to atomised forms of cyber activism and street action is characteristic of the broader shifts in North African popular politics that culminated in the Arab Spring. Politics is no longer controlled by a single party, set of state actors or a by a single man. Rather, it has increasingly taken the form of popular ‘activisms’, rejecting state-imposed binaries such as