Democrats without Democracy: Challenges to Women in Politics in the Arab World

Abstract

Latest statistics from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) indicate that the Arab world has 3 per cent or less of women in its legislatures — next to the lowest figure in the world. Parliaments are where many of the decisions that affect the lives of ordinary people are debated and passed as law, so the importance of these fora cannot be underestimated. Hence, the fact that the Arab world ‘enjoys’ such a small percentage, gives rise to many questions, the most burning of which is, why? This question becomes particularly interesting when the context of the region is taken into account. The Arab world is part of what used to be known as the Orient — a region of the world which was colonised for many years, and the staid study of which was shattered by the well-known work of Edward Said (1978) and others. In his seminal work Orientalism, Said laid bare the extent to which colonial history and its intellectual legacy resulted in knowledge produced about the region that was biased and disfigured as the colonial experience itself was. The Orient is one of the regions of the world where women are still largely perceived by the Western world as subordinated, oppressed and subjugated in various ways. In much of Western popular imagination, the Arab world is frequently associated with veiled women, men with long beards, religious fundamentalism (inevitably Islamic), terrorism war and hostage-taking.KeywordsPolitical PartyGender EqualityArab CountryArab WorldArab WomanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.