Women’s Activism and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The articles in this special issue were among those presented at a workshop we organized for the Sixth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, which took place from 16‒20 March 2005, in Montecatini, Italy. The purpose of the workshop was to examine the proposition that the public sphere in a number of MENA countries is changing and civil society becoming “feminized” due to women’s greater social participation, the proliferation of women’s organizations, their involvement in or initiation of public debates and national dialogues, and their access to various forms of media. Twelve papers were submitted and presented at the workshop, leading to a very lively discussion, but only a few could be included in this special issue. The papers lay out the complexity of various versions of women’s activism, their intricate relations with public space, and how that plays out in contemporary political and legal debates. In what remains, we provide a brief introduction to the guiding ideas and an overview of the papers’ arguments and findings. In Habermas’ conceptualization, the “public sphere” is a modern institution and a set of values that brings private persons together in public to engage in a context of reasoned debates (Habermas 1989). Civil society—the non-state realm of associational life, civility in public discourse, and state-society relations—constitutes an important part of the