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How can we enable all citizens, especially women, to participate in transitions to democracy processes?
Women’s rights advocates have been strategizing recently about the wave of uprisings across Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) nations on how to ensure that women’s rights are not jeopardised, while maintaining meaningful spaces for women’s rights activists to actively participate in the transition processes.
Two important initiatives have resulted from these convenings and conversations to fill an identified gap - a lack of information sharing and knowledge bridging among feminists across the regions that experienced similar uprisings; particularly along south-south and east-south lines - The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)‘s Online Resource Women’s Rights and Transitions to Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography; andWomen’s Learning Partnership’s (WLP) campaign Stand with Women Who Stand for Democracy.
Women have been active participants on the frontlines of protests and uprisings in the MENA region, and yet following the protests, two concerning trends have emerged. Firstly, women have become invisible from processes of forming new states, with men dominating leadership positions and women typically excluded from decision-making roles, responsibilities, and positions in the aftermath of the uprisings.
Secondly, the uprisings in MENA have resulted in strong and immediate backlash against women and women’s rights. The rise of religious fundamentalist leadership with renewed patriarchal agendas aiming to roll back previous gains of the women’s movements, even in countries with longer histories of women’s rights such as Tunisia, has been alarming. Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) have been burdened with daily human rights violations, lack of resources and tools, organizational tensions and constant attacks on them as activists.
The Strategizing Framework
In a context where women and their rights are used as bargaining chips during the transitions, women’s rights activists have been struggling to forge ahead a democratic future inclusive of women’s rights and equality.
AWID’s 12th International Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, attempted to maximize the space for activists from the region to share their similar experiences and insights, as well as to build meaningful bridges with women’s rights activists who have been through transition processes in different regions.
Almost 100 women’s rights leaders from over 18 countries in the MENA region, as well as activists from Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, attended the pre-meeting consultation on Women’s Rights in Transitions to Democracy: Achieving Rights, Resisting Backlash, where they shared case studies of women’s rights status, progress, limitations, and key areas for strategizing during democratic transitions. The meeting was planned by Women’s Learning Partnership, who also led the Forum Strategy Session devoted to strategizing around women’s rights and transitions to democracy. The insights from these conversations captures the context of the struggle for women’s rights in the MENA, and will be used to articulate key strategies that have been effectively used, need to be developed, or could be leveraged during diverse transitions to democracy, as they continue to unfold.
The Initiatives
These initiatives aim to support the immediate needs of activists in the MENA region and build global awareness on the issues by providing a reference and broad framework to assess reactions and responses to the particular challenges of transitions to democracy. They also aim to support learning, connection and action across women’s movements on a global level.
The Online Resource Women’s Rights and Transitions to Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography, is a collection of relevant experiences and practices of feminists from around the world engaged in similar, if not identical, struggles towards the democratization of their countries with a gendered lens and feminist politics. The intention of the bibliography is that it becomes an important knowledge bank, which activists can use, learn from, and engage with. It is hoped that this will provide an opportunity for women’s rights activists in the MENA region to learn from past experiences of promoting women’s rights in contexts of transitions in other parts of the world, as well as from the current experiences of their peers. It also intends to strengthen ties to women’s rights movements and activists in other regions, reflecting an aspiration for women’s rights organizations and activists to engage across regional boundaries.
As part of their own commitment to expand global awareness about these issues, WLP launched the campaign Stand with Women Who Stand for Democracy.The campaign, which includes online and offline activities, “is meant to raise global awareness that democracy will not be achieved – in the MENA region nor elsewhere – without the full participation of women, who are half the population, and equal human rights for all citizens.” Activists are encouraged to join the campaign and take action by becoming Campaign Ambassador, signing and circulating the campaign petition, or hosting local or virtual film screenings of the eye-opening documentary, produced by WLP, about the struggle of women in countries experiencing the so-called “Arab Spring”, Because Our Cause Is Just.
Research assistance by Angelika Arutyunova
