Abstract Constitutional Courts (CCs) have significant responsibilities, including interpreting the constitution, safeguarding fundamental rights, and ensuring that laws adhere to constitutional principles. However, the effectiveness of CCs’ decisions in promoting democratic processes and upholding the rule of law remains a subject of debate. This is particularly true when court decisions grapple with sensitive societal issues such as women’s identity. The Turkish Constitutional Court’s (TCC) decisions on married women’s surname rights exemplify this tension, since it has consistently upheld legislation mandating that married women adopt their husbands’ surnames. This study focuses specifically on TCC cases concerning married women’s surname rights, which have been criticized for perpetuating gender inequality and restricting women’s autonomy. It aims to explore how decisions by CCs can potentially erode democratic values and seeks to illustrate how TCC rulings on married women’s surnames exemplify cases where constitutional adjudication might not achieve desired rule of law outcomes.
This paper examines the participation of Algerian women in the 2019 Hirak protests and their efforts to claim gendered and economic recognition within a society shaped by authoritarian and patriarchal structures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and forty-three interviews conducted in 2019 and 2023, the study explores how women navigate both public protest spaces and more intimate "sociospaces"-such as markets, schools, homes, and informal gatherings within the Hirak-to assert claims for autonomy and recognition. The article introduces the concept of a "gendered moral contract," showing how Algerian women across social classes mobilize moral, religious, and familial frameworks to demand state-backed compensation for unpaid domestic labor by positioning themselves as essential contributors to family and society. By linking these claims to broader economic resources, including oil wealth, women negotiate recognition within culturally intelligible forms. This study contributes to understanding agency and strategies within social movements, highlighting how women employ culturally grounded, morally framed approaches to frame and share their demands under restrictive political and social conditions.
Abstract Drawing on fieldwork data, this article unpacks the differentiated experiences of two traditionally “mobile” communities affected by statelessness in Lebanon: specifically, those identified as “Bedouin” and “Dom.” Shared legal statuses mean stateless members of the two surveyed communities encounter similar barriers to services and ultimately to resolving their statelessness. However, varying perceptions around their “mobile” identities shape respective engagements with state institutions and wider Lebanese society. Stateless Bedouin research participants could generally navigate governance systems, and solve or mitigate statelessness-related challenges, better than their stateless Dom counterparts. This is partly explained by stateless Bedouins’ greater access to sympathetic allies (including non-stateless Bedouin officials) willing to advocate on their behalf. These findings underscore the need for nuanced understanding of statelessness and mobility, and the interplay between them. We argue that legal status does not engender uniform experiences but rather operates at variance based on intersection with wider perceptions about communal identity.
The 2019 uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Iraq, often framed as a 'Second Wave' of the Arab uprisings, present a critical puzzle: why did mass mobilization reemerge nearly a decade after the 2011 revolutions, despite their mixed outcomes? This article argues that the post-conflict trajectories of these countries are central to understanding these movements. By integrating post-conflict studies and social movement theory, we conceptualize post-conflict as an analytical category that shapes mobilization dynamics through the reconstruction of citizenship regimes, collective memory, and governance mechanisms. These regimes, designed to consolidate state power and enforce security, delimit acceptable forms of political participation and identity. The 2019 uprisings revealed both the fragility of these post-conflict arrangements and the transformative potential of mobilization, highlighting the dual dynamic of boundary-pushing and self-imposed limits as activists navigated internalized 'red lines' shaped by conflict memory and state repression. This framework offers new insights into the relationship between post-conflict governance, citizenship reconstruction, and social movement mobilization, emphasizing the need for further comparative research on the conditions under which marginalized groups successfully contest exclusionary political orders.
At a conference on Critical Knowledge Production in Social Sciences and Feminist Studies in Iraq, scholars debated whether Iraq's Tishreen Movement was feminist and shifted social perceptions of gender. As activists or critical observers, the movement prompted them to reconsider gender dynamics, feminism, and pedagogy. This paper focuses on women social scientists in Iraq and their activism and/or scholarship in the Tishreen Movement. The paper hypothesizes that, while Iraqi women social scientists may see the movement differently, it unites them towards radical Iraqi pedagogy and scholarship over the long term. This paper takes a structuralist approach and examines the intersection between women's political and academic struggles against institutionalized patriarchy. This paper borrows from bell hooks' feminism frameand relies on a select number of interviews with Iraq-based social scientists.
Abstract Islamic legal traditions in Iraqi Kurdistan equip husbands with the power of effecting a divorce by speech. Construed as an authoritative speaking subject in the law, husbands nonetheless often give divorces that they regret, and seek the advice of muftis to repair legitimate marriages. Muftis in turn sometimes call upon the personal status law enforced in state courts to facilitate that repair. Yet, the nuance of legal process show that legal sovereignty emerges in a dialogue between multiple actors in and beyond legal institutions that stretch beyond the state. Challenging the widespread narrative of ascending state sovereignty in Iraq, this process redirects inquiry to more complex dialogues of power among husbands, wives, muftis, and the state that requires attention to what ordinary Muslims do with law.
Abstract Survey research on public opinion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has dramatically increased in both quantity and quality over the past generation. However, this has not been matched by discussion about the intellectual assumptions of public opinion research in the region as it expands into non-Western and/or non-democratic settings. To remedy this deficiency, we begin this type of investigation by assessing the resonance of public opinion definitions using data from a nationally representative face-to-face survey conducted in the Arab Gulf state of Qatar. Our results reveal substantial variation in the relative accuracy ascribed to each of five definitions of public opinion proposed in the scholarly literature. We find that the two most salient definitions form a continuum ranging from the textbook definition of public opinion as the aggregation of independent views, to the opposite view of public opinion as discursive societal consensus.
This paper explores the interplay between women’s activism, war-generated diaspora, and peacebuilding in Yemen, focusing on Yemeni women’s engagement and disengagement in peace processes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Yemeni diaspora activists in Western Europe, mainly Germany and the Netherlands, between 2021 and 2024, it examines how structural, social, and individual factors, together with the dynamics of homeland and host-country politics, shape women’s agency and political activism. Moving beyond the binary of inclusion versus exclusion, the analysis traces non-linear trajectories of activism marked by pauses, reorientations, and transformations. The findings demonstrate that the war in Yemen continues to provoke strong emotional responses among diaspora women, often channeled into renewed mobilization and peace-related efforts rather than complete withdrawal. Exclusionary practices in formal peace talks, while constraining, also generate resilience and counter-resistance, prompting many activists to reconfigure their engagement into alternative political, social, and cultural forms.
This article explores female revolutionaries’ political subjectivities during what is popularly known as the December Revolution. Young women played an especially important role in the revolution in ways that challenged prevailing political and social norms concerning what is considered ‘appropriate.’ Women’s peaceful protesting was seen as so threatening that their bodies came under attack, and were sidelined in the political settlement. Building on original interview data with female revolutionaries and feminist activists, this article suggests that the revolution and the subsequent backlash served as a significant force in creating a generational consciousness where young revolutionaries started to think of themselves as ‘feminists’ and distinct from the older generation of activists. Their emerging feminist reimaginations, now disrupted by war, are intimately entangled with the dismantling of the heteronormative, militarizing Arab-Muslim state-building project in Sudan and exposed how political elites, regardless of ideological belonging, have patriarchal dividends, including the historical women’s movement.
Two essays composed by F. Gregory Gause at the outset of his scholarly career offer innovative explanations for the impact of revolutionary movements on the international politics of the Middle East and North Africa. These contributions point to the importance of state consolidation in limiting the spread of popular upheaval and lay out a range of dimensions of state consolidation that deserve further exploration. Moreover, the argument that Gause proposes can provide insight into the dynamics of regional relations in the aftermath of the mass uprisings that washed across the Middle East and North Africa starting in the winter of 2010-11.
On the eve of October 17, 2019, Lebanon's uprising spread to Tripoli, and for six months transformed its main roundabout, Al-Nour square, into a revolutionary space. With subjectivities forged by decades of clientelism, sectarianized modes of political participation, and anticipation of violence in daily life, pro-uprising revolutionaries sought alternatives by breaking away from the intuitive political practices that had guided most Trabulsis up to that point. This article discusses how experiences of violence and clientelism have structured how Trabulsis perceive everyday politics in their city. It then zooms into three repertoires of contention that Trabulsi revolutionaries took to protect their uprising from slipping into these known patterns. These repertoires include protecting the uprising from spoilers who would delegitimize the movement, actively countering narratives of sectarianization that had the potential of riling up Tripoli's Sunni-majority protestors, and reckoning with the interplay of charity and clientelism in appealing to Tripoli's working class.
In the second wave of Arab Uprisings, Algerian youth played significant roles in the 2019 hirak movement, with fifty-four weeks of marches. This intergenerational social movement saw the removal of President Bouteflika, affecting popular consciousness as to the possibility of change. Though youth participation in formal politics remains low, new repertoires of youth activism have emerged, drawing on historical legacies of the Independence struggle. Whereas previous studies emphasize risk aversion and obstacles for social movements in post-conflict settings, the Algerian hirak, through creative and peaceful protest, enabled new narratives and learning from past conflicts. These new ways of mobilizing politically, rejecting attempts to provoke violence, instead repeating the word silmiya, or peaceful, became a source of pride. These alternative narratives are important to understand the potential of youth activism and social movements in post-conflict contexts, to tackle mistrust and fear, maintain non-violent protest, and inspire reflection about more peaceful futures.
While many studies of public opinion in authoritarian regimes rely on list experiments to overcome sensitivity bias, we show in this paper that a different technique, the crosswise variant of the randomized response design, has superior performance at measuring latent opposition to authoritarian regimes with fewer assumptions. To show the power of this design, we randomly assigned a panel of 924 Tunisian survey respondents to receive either a direct question about support for Tunisian President Kais Saied or a randomized response question. Our results reveal that between 10% to 30% of Tunisians oppose the president but would not report this opposition on a direct question. We further employed a Bayesian parameterization of the randomized response design to decompose the sensitivity bias and model latent opposition and bias as a function of survey covariates. We find that ideological and policy disagreement with the president strongly predicts latent opposition, but that these same measures are negatively related to sensitivity bias. As a result, we show that respondents who are ideologically closer to the president--that is, the moderate opposition--tend to be more afraid of reporting their resistance to the regime than the more radical opposition.
Abstract This special issue calls on scholars to rethink Yemen from its margins, considering marginality as politically and epistemically generative spaces. The five interdisciplinary contributions to the volume use an intersectional framework to shed light on the historical and contemporary experiences of marginalized communities in Yemen, and their resilience in the face of multifaceted crises. Taken together, they offer empirically rich and theoretically ambitious accounts of how marginalization is produced, experienced, and resisted in Yemen, with particular attention to post-2011 contexts. Exploring struggles of often overlooked actors – women, exiled activists, Southern youth, and Yemenis of mixed-racial descent – the articles not only trace various forms of agency, but also examine the limits of dominant epistemic frameworks on Yemen’s politics. By recognizing Yemeni marginalized actors as knowledge producers and political agents in their own right, the special issue raises questions about how exclusionary practices have contributed to Yemen’s crisis, and how they must be addressed in reconstruction processes to build an inclusive, just, and lasting peace.
Abstract “Women” as a group of people and an analytical category has long been treated from an exceptionalist perspective. Not long ago, it was customary to write a country’s political history only through men’s eyes, with women as a short mention in the index. In Middle Eastern Studies, this custom was accelerated by the self-imposed belief that male scholars cannot study women or that women “belong” to an imaginary “private sphere,” fully disconnected from the realm of politics. In Yemeni Studies, the contribution of women’s activism in shaping polity and society has been overlooked in the narrative of the country’s history. In Western and Western-educated scholarship, women’s activism has been merely regarded from the perspective of “women’s issues,” considered marginal in the first place. In my paper, I look at women’s activism through the readings that the activists have made on critical issues in national politics. My interest is not narrowly examining how these groups have been able to promote women’s causes but to study how the activists and their organizations have analyzed national politics, what kind of choices they have made, and which initiatives have proven insightful for the entire nation and the region. With case studies from the Yemeni city of Aden, from the late British colonial time throughout the Socialist regime period to the current republic at war, I discuss activist women’s political choices and posit that their insights warrant attention: they have usually had it right. My paper is based on long-time ethnographic fieldwork in Aden and archival and media sources.
Abstract This article critically examines the international approach in implementing the Women, Peace, and Security ( wps ) agenda, focusing on the distinction between women’s representation and gender inclusion in Yemen’s peace processes. It argues that meaningful inclusion requires integrating gender perspectives into all phases of peacebuilding, and moving beyond mere representation. Through the Yemeni case study, the paper highlights the challenges women peace activists face within contexts with traditional, conservative, and sometimes extremist norms and the difficulties of translating international women’s rights into the local context. It also explores the complications arising from inter-agency tensions between osesgy and UN Women, ultimately calling for a nuanced, context-sensitive approach that acknowledges the agency of Yemeni women.
Abstract This article sheds light on marginalization and activism of the muwalladeen —Yemenis of mixed racial descent, whose parents or grandparents lived abroad, in particular in Africa and Asia. Building on the insights from critical citizenship studies, we explore how intersecting factors (such as race, gender, or legal status) shape experiences of belonging and strategies of resistance. We draw on interviews and conversations with muwalladeen activists in Yemen and the diaspora, to trace the evolution of muwalladeen ’s activism within the context of Yemen’s 2011 uprising, the ongoing war and subsequent displacement. If the war narrows down the space for activism in Yemen, exile, we argue may provide marginalized groups with new opportunities to advance their cause. While some muwalladeen have tried to externalize their struggle to seek international support, women in diaspora have increasingly used online platforms to assert their mixed-racial identities, starting debates, from which they had been previously excluded.
On October 17, 2019, protests broke out across all parts of Lebanon. By the next day, hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets, voicing their anger at decades of corruption, poor governance, the collapsing economy, and their standard of living. In this article, I analyze the various emotions and emotional displays that arose during and after the uprising, arguing for an approach that centers ambivalence as an ongoing emotional state. I depart from prescriptive theories in the social movements’ literature on emotions to consider the messy, multiple, and at times contradictory emotions that protestors experience in protests. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with protestors, I focus on youth experiences of the uprising and situate the analysis firmly in the post-civil war political and social context in Lebanon.
On 13 January 1986, the capital of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (pdry), Aden, was afflicted by a violent leadership struggle within the Yemeni Socialist Party (ysp). Although this event took place almost forty years ago, the year of 1986 has been persistently treated by think tanks, researchers, international organizations, and policymakers, as a portent for potential conflicts in contemporary South Yemen. Drawing upon policy reports related to the August 2019 confrontations between the Southern Transitional Council (stc) and the former Internationally Recognized Government of Yemen (irgy), I analyze how the three intersecting axes of regional origin, age, and political positionality have been key factors in marginalizing and excluding southern activists from governance and self-determination. I then discuss how activists try to overcome the delegitimization of their calls for independence. This paper opens up discussions on multiple systems of marginalization intersecting in southern activists’ lives.
