Abstract
The civic status of female citizens in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is conceptualized as “enfranchised minorhood” which reflects the confined position of adult women as legal minors under the trusteeship of male kin in family law, criminal law, and nationality law. During and in the aftermath of the Uprisings that erupted throughout MENA in 2011, female lawyers in Morocco, Lebanon, and Kuwait allied with women’s groups and pressured for reforms in patriarchal state laws. By 2015, reforms were manifest in criminal law; incremental in family law; and absent in nationality law. Theoretical conclusions based on comparative analysis of societal pressures in three states indicate that long historical trajectories are imperative for substantiating the expansion of female citizenship following the 2011 Uprisings. Additionally, the civic status of women in the MENA region is being strengthened under authoritarian monarchical rule in Kuwait and Morocco. A third finding is that pressures for reform have more visible reverberations in legal spheres with a clerical imprint such as family law and criminal law, while strengthened pressures in a secular legal sphere such as nationality law have been opposed more forcefully five years after the Uprisings.
Highlights
I experienced the 2011 Uprisings throughout the Arab world—what came to be termed the “Arab Spring”—in self-imposed isolation trying to finalize my Ph.D. thesis at the library of the American University of Beirut (AUB)
Hailed as the most comprehensive legal reform of women’s civil rights in the Arab world since Tunisia passed its 1956 family law, the Moroccan family law reform in 2004—the mudawwana—heralded a new dawn for expanding female citizenship based on interpretations of Islamic religious texts, and inferences drawn from human rights conventions such as the Woman’s
“After reading all fifteen laws on personal status we agreed that child custody was the one issue that concerned women most, and that it constituted an act of violence,” said lawyer and leader of the Working Women League in Lebanon (WWL) Iqbal Dougan
Summary
I experienced the 2011 Uprisings throughout the Arab world—what came to be termed the “Arab Spring”—in self-imposed isolation trying to finalize my Ph.D. thesis at the library of the American University of Beirut (AUB). Whereas my point of departure in previous works focused on a woman’s capacity to initiate and obtain divorce, the analysis in this article circles around societal pressures by female lawyers to change patriarchal state laws where the civic personhood of women is contingent on, or mediated by, male kin As such, it is the contained and contracted civic personhood of female citizens, here seen analytically as “enfranchised minors” because a female citizen has voting rights, i.e., political rights, without having civic rights to her own personhood, women’s incomplete citizenship in most MENA states. Female citizenship implies here the set of civil, economic, and political rights as defined by the Constitution, the state’s family law, nationality law, criminal law, and labor and social security laws These laws regulate the civic legal capacity and civil autonomy of a female citizen in the polity and thereby structure the relationship between her and the state. Expanded female citizenship is occurring under the auspices of authoritarian rule and militarized governance in the post-2011 era
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