Women's Rights

Citation:

Adamson, Clarissa. 2007. “Gendered Anxieties: Islam, Women’s Rights, and Moral Hierarchy in Java.” Anthropological Quarterly 80 (1): 5–37.

Author: Clarissa Adamson

Abstract:

This paper examines debates that occur in the course of Muslim women's rights advocacy in Java, Indonesia, to provide critical ethnographic insights into the ways that gender issues and notions of family are implicated in political consciousness about nationhood, religious identity, boundaries, and governance. Javanese Muslim women's rights activists focus on the historical contextualization of religious doctrine to argue against what they see as misguided interpretations of Islam that threaten to control women. This paper examines these efforts through a close reading of the discursive shifts and arguments that take place in the context of programs designed to promote women's rights in Islamic education in Java. It argues that the challenge for women's rights activists and intellectuals is to locate the ways that moderate or normative social and religious values can combine during times of change or crisis to reinforce a moral hierarchy of gender relations and an "idea of woman" in an attempt to control such change. The paper demonstrates that in Java, a moral hierarchy of gender relations, mimetically extended from family to nation, dovetails with religious interpretations to resolve anxieties about social change and security through the control of women.

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies, Governance, Nationalism, Political Participation, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights, Security Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Indonesia

Year: 2007

Citation:

Shaheed, Farida. 2006. “Rising Phoenixes: Creative Resistance by Victimized Women.” Development 49 (1): 52–54.

Author: Farida Shaheed

Abstract:

Farida Shaheed reports on a series of encounters held at and around the AWID Forum where drawing on their experiences of violence and extremisms, women spoke of the ‘moment of opportunity’ created by violence, how they harnessed this moment, and cast off the role of narrators of sufferings to assume the mantle of leadership. She asks feminists to examine why women’s rights activists have not extended the support needed to victim-led initiatives emerging out of political violence and why the responses are so often limited to an abstract theoretical level. She proposes that ‘victim’-led models of resistance are needed not only for the women involved in large-scale violence but for all feminists.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Political Participation, Rights, Women's Rights, Violence

Year: 2006

Citation:

Ruddick, Sara. 1983. “Pacifying the Forces: Drafting Women in the Interests of Peace.” Signs 8 (3): 471–89.

Author: Sara Ruddick

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Female Combatants, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Militarism, Nonviolence, Peace Processes, Rights, Women's Rights

Year: 1983

Citation:

Caprioli, Mary, and Kimberly Lynn Douglass. 2008. “Nation Building and Women: The Effect of Intervention on Women’s Agency.” Foreign Policy Analysis 4 (1): 45–65.

Authors: Mary Caprioli, Kimberly Lynn Douglass

Abstract:

Regardless of the primary motive, international military intervention aimed at nation building is partly intended to establish democratic societies. And scholars have demonstrated that intervention does have a positive impact on democratization. With democratization generally follows greater support for human rights. Feminist scholars, however, have questioned definitions of democracy in which at minimal, women’s political rights are absent. This brings into question the impact of intervention on the status of women. Particularly in both Iraq and Afghanistan women’s rights have become prominent in the post-invasion American political rhetoric. Since intervention seems to be associated with the spread of democratic principles, we seek to discover whether intervention actually moves societies toward gender equality. We examine all six cases of completed military intervention aimed at nation building in sovereign states during the post Cold War period. Three of the cases—El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia—evidence democratic change; whereas, the remaining three states—Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia—remain undemocratized. We test the extent to which intervention has or has not improved women’s equality and find no dramatic effect, either positive or negative, of intervention on the status of women in any of the six states.

Topics: Democracy / Democratization, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Political Participation, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights

Year: 2008

Citation:

Bunch, Charlotte. 1995. “Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights: Where Next after Vienna." St. John's Law Review 69: 171-78.

Author: Charlotte Bunch

Topics: Gender, Women, International Law, International Human Rights, International Organizations, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights

Year: 1995

Citation:

Amowitz, Lynn L., Glen Kim, Chen Reis, Jana L. Asher, and Vincent Iacopino. 2004. “Human Rights Abuses and Concerns about Women’s Health and Human Rights in Southern Iraq.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 291 (12): 1471–79.

Authors: Lynn L. Amowitz, Glen Kim, Chen Reis, Jana L. Asher, Vincent Iacopino

Abstract:

The people of Iraq have endured 35 years of repression and widespread human rights violations under the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein. After the 1991 Gulf War, the regime suppressed popular uprisings among 14 of 18 governorates, including major insurrections in the predominantly Kurdish North and mostly Shi’a South. Thousands of Iraqis have reportedly disappeared, but the full scope of these atrocities, especially those perpetrated against the Shi’a after their 1991 uprising against the Baath regime, is unknown. More than 150 mass graves have been discovered recently throughout Iraq, some of which may contain victims of the 1991 Baath regime repression of this Shi’a uprising. 

The purpose of this study was to assess the nature and scope of human rights abuses in southern Iraq since the Shi’a uprising in 1991. More specifically, the study was designed to identify specific human rights abuses and perpetrators, to determine health and human rights concerns with a focus on women’s rights, and to examine Iraqi views on women’s rights and roles in society and provisions for community health and development.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Development, Ethnicity, Gender, Women, Health, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iraq

Year: 2004

Citation:

Jain, Pratibha. 2005. “Balancing Minority Rights and Gender Justice: The Impact of Protecting Multiculturalism on Women’s Rights in India.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 23: 201-22.

Author: Pratibha Jain

Topics: Gender, Justice, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2005

Citation:

Banda, Fareda. 2006. “Women, Law and Human Rights in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32 (1): 13–27.

Author: Fareda Banda

Abstract:

This article examines the development of human rights in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It looks at personal laws and the attempts of parties in postcolonial states to deal with conflicts that arise between the dictates of state customary law, which may be discriminatory towards women, and the move towards embracing human rights with their focus on the removal of sex and gender-based discrimination. While it is clear that there has been enormous progress made in enshrining women's rights, the article urges caution, noting that there are limits to the law's power to change behaviour. Law cannot always provide a solution to discrimination rooted in socio-economic and cultural dispossession. The article is divided into four parts. Part one introduces the legal systems of the region. Part two offers a discussion of the different constitutional models illustrated by case law relating to inheritance. Part three provides an overview of the African engagement with human rights before moving on to consider the two Declarations of the SADC in dealing with gender-based discrimination and violence against women. Part four focuses on the rights contained within the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women, adopted by the African Union in July 2003.

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Women, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equity, Governance, Constitutions, International Organizations, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, Southern Africa

Year: 2006

Citation:

Haas, Liesl, and Merike H. Blofield. 2005. “Defining a Democracy: Reforming the Laws on Women’s Rights in Chile, 1990–2002.” Latin American Politics and Society 47 (3): 35–68.

Authors: Liesl Haas, Merike H. Blofield

Abstract:

This article evaluates 38 bills seeking to expand women's rights in Chile and finds that the successful ones often originated with the Executive National Women's Ministry (SERNAM), did not threaten existing definitions of gender roles, and did not require economic redistribution. These factors (plus the considerable influence of the Catholic Church) correlate in important ways, and tend to constrain political actors in ways not apparent from an examination of institutional roles or ideological identity alone. In particular, the Chilean left's strategic response to this complex web of interactions has enabled it to gain greater legislative influence on these issues over time.

Topics: Gender, Governance, Political Participation, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Chile

Year: 2005

Citation:

Chacha, Babere Kerata, and Kenneth Nyangena. 2006. “Globalisation of Sex and the Problematics of Gender Identities in Africa: From Human Rights to Women’s Rights to Sexual Freedom.” Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa 1-2: 29-36.

Authors: Babere Kerata Chacha, Kenneth Nyangena

Topics: Gender, Women, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights, Sexuality Regions: Africa

Year: 2006