Women's NGOs Research Articles

"Her body, her right"?: interrogating the discourse on abortion in Sri Lanka

This paper calls attention to an issue, abortion, that requires the urgent attention of those interested in the reproductive health indicators of women. The author's investigation of the issue arises from three particular phenomena: a) the high incidence of back-alley abortions in Sri Lanka; b) the failed attempt in 1995 by the People's Alliance government to liberalise the restrictive law on abortion; and c) the media campaign of the Women's NGO Forum in 1999 to generated a public debate on the issue. The paper begins with an analysis of both how and why abortion has come to be such a key issue in discussions on and debates around women's rights and women's reproductive health across the globe and argues for considering it a vital reproductive health issue in Sri Lanka as well. It then critically interrogates the vocabulary deployed by the Women's NGO Forum to initiate a debate in Sri Lanka and proposes an alternative grammar of communication that might better suit the particular socio-cultural context and better address the issues at hand.

Gender and Nationalism in Bosnia

Elissa Helms. (2013). Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation and Women's Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 325 pp., $26.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-299-29554-7). The war in Bosnia produced many horrifying images, none more powerful than Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) women as victims of systematic wartime rape. These images in turn had profound effects on international interventions meant to rebuild that society. As Elissa Helms points out, however, this was an image of Bosnia without the voices of women themselves. Her book is a corrective, “offer[ing] an alternative to images of the passive, Muslim female victim, focusing on women’s active roles” (27). And indeed, this book is a wonderful corrective, one that gives an in-depth look at the complexities of Bosnian society through the lens of women activists. Based on fifteen years of ethnographic field work spent mostly with women's NGOs—ranging from antinationalist feminists to religious and nationalist groups—the book shows the ways in which gender is deployed by nationalism and nationalists, as well as by outside donors and the entire range of women activists. The result highlights the unintended consequences not only of the use of gender, but also of outside donor efforts to improve gender and national relations in … vgagnon{at}ithaca.edu

The Diplomatic History of Global Women's Rights: The British Foreign Office and International Women's Year, 1975

This article explores the British Foreign Office's engagement with International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, an event which has been viewed as a milestone in histories of transnational feminist activism, and a moment when the status of women became part of mainstream thinking about development, human rights and global security. Much of the existing literature on IWY dwells on the role of non-state actors, especially women's NGOs active at the United Nations (UN). In contrast, this article shifts the lens on to state actors, in order to ask what role diplomats, politicians and ministries of foreign affairs played in the construction of ‘women’ as a global political subject in the late twentieth century. It finds that the Foreign Office's reading of IWY was refracted through the prism of Cold War power politics and postcolonial struggles. Gender politics was conceptualised as essentially a proxy for these larger ideological battles, an approach dating back to Britain's semi-clandestine anti-communist propaganda campaigns after the Second World War. British women's NGOs, by contrast, insisted that women's activism should be accorded an independent dynamic of its own, imagining the possibilities of gender-based solidarities operating across political, social and economic divides. IWY and the subsequent UN Decade for Women tempered this idealism and set the international women's movement on a political learning curve. But, as the article will suggest, the 1970s was also a moment when state elites were forced to confront a new kind of global politics, the repercussions of which for the conduct of foreign policy and diplomatic relations only further fine-grained archival research can fully reveal.

“KAMER, a women's center and an experiment in cultivating cosmopolitan norms”

1 1 This research was conducted in the context of a project funded by TUBITAK, The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey, entitled “Gender Based Violence: Analysis of the Problem and the Struggle Against it” (no 105 K075 SOBAG), also supported by Bogazici University and Sabanci University. We would like to extend our gratitude to Nebahat Akkoç and all the KAMER women who generously shared their experiences with us. Nora Fisher Onar and Hande Paker invited us to their symposium on “Grounding Cosmopolitanism” and made most valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the article. We are also grateful to them. In this article, we shall focus on KAMER-Women's Center, the largest women's NGO organized in Eastern and South Eastern Turkey to see how it negotiates and nurtures cosmopolitan norms among women of conflicting persuasions. KAMER is a striking case because it has been successful in bringing together women with deep hostilities and uniting them over human rights based feminist values in a struggle against gender based violence. KAMER thus cultivates cosmopolitan norms through its unique struggle against gender based violence. Its non-violent activism is particularly noteworthy because the organization reaches women in the context of militarized ethnic nationalisms, both Turkish and Kurdish, in Kurdish populated Southeastern Turkey.

Civilno društvo i ženske nevladine organizacije u Srbiji

In the paper we examine the position of civil society in Serbia, particularly women's NGOs. In the first part of the paper author will point out the concept and development of the concept of nongovernmental organizations as well as the position and problems of civil society in Serbia. In the second part of the paper the author deals with the emergence and development of women's organizations and points out some problems in their work within civil society. In this section, we will point out the important information from the researches of women's NGOs in Serbia.

TÜRKİYE’DE SİVİL TOPLUM KURULUŞLARI VE SOSYAL SERMAYE

The aim of this study is to describe the concept of social capital in the context of social development and women NGO’s of which is dwelled on enormously from 1990s by lots of social sciences such as sociology, economics, management sciences, law and lately used to explain developmental differences between communities. In this study, the cities of Ankara, Çankırı, Trabzon and Elazığ are determined as the study area. In-depth interview technique was used in the study. To assess the data MAXQDA qualitative content analysis method was used. Seventeen women were interviewed. In this study, it has been concluded that the abundance and diversity of network, the relationship between trust and participation rate is insufficient to reveal the formation of social capital. Multitudeness of networks does not show that organizations can benefit from them and reach resources on those, and each network can not generate social capital at the same rate. As a result of this research, It is seen that social capital has an important role for women NGO’s to achieve their goals for social development and overcome obstacles they encounter.

New directions for women's political development in Turkey: Exploring the implications of the internet for Ka-der

Underrepresentation of women in Turkish politics is well documented. This is evident in the numbers of women in key decision-making positions, including the Parliament. The role of women's NGOs is significant in educating, motivating and mobilizing women to participate in politics. These organizations increasingly use the Internet for mobilization, opinion formation, recruitment, networking, lobbying and fundraising. The paper explores the extent to which and the ways in which Ka-der as a WNGOs is affected by the Internet, both in terms of its structure and operation, including its relationships with members and adherents and in the way Ka-der communicates with external actors, such as similar organizations, potential members, politicians and the media. We argue that different functions of WNGOs are supported asymmetrically by the Internet. While the e-mail group is mostly used for internal purposes, the website and the use of social media serve to enhance links with the outside environment.

Political aid and Arab activism: democracy promotion, justice, and representation

What does it mean to promote 'transitions to democracy' in the Middle East? How have North American, European and multilateral projects advanced human rights, authoritarian retrenchment or Western domination? This book examines transnational programs in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, the exceptional cases of Palestine and Iraq, and the Arab region at large during two tumultuous decades. To understand the controversial and contradictory effects of political aid, Sheila Carapico analyzes discursive and professional practices in four key subfields: the rule of law, electoral design and monitoring, women's political empowerment and civil society. From the institutional arrangements for extraordinary undertakings such as Saddam Hussein's trial or Palestinian elections to routine templates for national women's machineries or NGO networks, her research explores the paradoxes and jurisdictional disputes confronted by Arab activists for justice, representation and 'non-governmental' agency.

NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women's NGO’

AbstractThe inclusion by Northern stakeholders of a discursively constructed category of ‘Southern women's NGO’ – increasingly heralded as the ultimate organisational form of grounded, subaltern, collective action – has come to represent a signifier of commitments to gender equality, poverty reduction and/or social justice. Southern women's NGOs are frequently credited with the capacity to facilitate the inclusion of marginalised groups conventionally excluded from development's frame. This critical review argues that this essentialism derives firstly from the belief in the Southern NGO as a grounded, democratic and accessible organisational form well suited to reach and represent the diverse and disparate needs of the grassroots. Secondly, it reflects the tendency, despite an abundance of critical black, Third World and postcolonial feminist theory warning to the contrary, to cast ‘Southern women’ as a category of politicised agents who share trajectories of historical and contemporary oppression that allow them to transcend other axes of difference to achieve improved development outcomes. The discussion examines this tendency, and whether it has led to a wholesale belief in the capacity of both ‘Southern women’ and ‘Southern NGOs’ to reach as well as represent anti‐hegemonic, subaltern and thus alternative development paradigms. The analysis concludes with some brief reflections on both the discursive and practical implications of privileging the ‘Southern women's NGO’, expressed as a homogenous category, as a key interlocutor between the powerful and the marginalised in development.

Strategic Essentialism and Vatican Policy

Just as women's NGOs around the world use essentialism strategically—calling upon their assigned roles as mothers to create change for their children that they might not feel empowered to create for themselves—the most recent Vatican policy holds on to the remnants of essentialism as a policy for protecting exclusive male access to ordination, and therefore power in the church. Previously, essentialism had protected male superiority in existence, social roles, the family, and the church, but one by one, all of these have been conceded except male superiority in the church. The paper further proposes that the traditional male role, of which the church has been a principal support, has in fact now become detrimental to males.

Challenges in framing women's rights as human rights at the domestic level: A case study of NGOs in the post-Soviet countries

This case study examines framing as an essential communication strategy used by women's rights NGOs at international and domestic levels. The article uses a theoretical framework of transnational advocacy networks, originally developed by political scientists Keck and Sikkink (1998), to demonstrate the importance of public relations’ efforts in political communication campaigns of women's rights NGOs around the world. Supported by the United Nations, these NGOs play an important role in democracy building and contribute to women's empowerment efforts. However, an examination of communication strategies used by these NGOs to help implement the Platform for Action—the UN-promoted agenda for women's empowerment—showed that the existing frame of women's rights as human rights may not be successful in all contexts. This study argues that at the domestic level the issue of women's rights needs to be presented in greater detail than the current human rights frame allows it to be.

The “women's court” in India: an alternative dispute resolution body for women in distress

The ‘women's court’ (mahila adalat or mahila mandal) is a fairly recent but increasingly prevalent phenomenon in contemporary India. A particular kind of alternative dispute-resolution forum specifically designed to address women's marital and related family problems, it aims to provide a safe and unthreatening environment wherein women can air their grievances, work out satisfactory settlements with husbands and in-laws, or find ways to escape their difficult situations altogether. It encourages women to resolve domestic disputes informally, rather than by resort to the state's judicatory institutions. Most women's courts are run by women's NGOs, often with financial support from foreign donor agencies or, in some cases, from governmental or semi-governmental agencies such as State Women's Commissions or Legal Aid Societies. This paper discusses the structure and workings of some of these women's courts, based on two decades of ethnographic observations and interviews in such venues as well as on the work of other scholars who have studied similar bodies more intensively than I. It highlights some of the unique features of these ‘courts,’ shows why they are the forum of choice for so many poor women, and asks how effective they are in delivering justice to those who come to them for help.

Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism

This article is a critical examination of Nancy Fraser's contrast of early second‐wave feminism and contemporary global feminism in “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” (Fraser 2009). Fraser contrasts emancipatory early second‐wave feminism, strongly critical of capitalism, with feminism in the age of neoliberalism as being in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. I argue that Fraser's historical account of 1970s mainstream second‐wave feminism is inaccurate, that it was not generally anti‐capitalist, critical of the welfare system, or challenging the priority of paid labor. I claim Fraser mistakenly takes a minority feminist position as mainstream. I further argue that Fraser's account of feminism today echoes arguments from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2001) to Hester Eisenstein (2009), but such arguments ignore contemporary feminist minority positions. I challenge Fraser's arguments that feminism legitimates neoliberalism to women, that women's NGOs are simply service‐providers enabling the state to withdraw services, and that criticisms of microcredit lending programs can be generalized into criticisms of women's feminism and women's NGOs today. I argue that these claims are vast over‐generalizations and ignore countertrends. I give empirical evidence to support my objections by considering women's activities in post‐communist European countries, which Fraser discusses.

The Dynamics of Restraint in Côte d'Ivoire

Research on conflict prevention has mainly focused on the causes of war and post‐conflict reconstruction. Our knowledge on how civilians manage to contain violence in unstable and conflict environments is, however, very limited. This article aims to understand, in the context of the civil war in Cote d'Ivoire, how and why ‘islands of peace’ emerge during outbreaks of violence. It identifies both the local and structural conditions and mechanisms (including formal and informal) that help to mitigate violence and encourage restraint in conflict‐affected and unstable situations. Our research and analysis has focused on the western region, which is the epicentre of violence. Semi‐structured interviews with Young Patriots members, the military, the business community, representatives of women's NGOs, traditional leaders and representatives of the religious community, along with interviews in Abidjan, provided the primary data for our analysis.

KAREN GARNER. Shaping a Global Women's Agenda: Women's NGOs and Global Governance, 1925-85.

In her new book, Karen Garner seeks to propel forward feminist action by providing lessons about the achievements women enjoyed and missteps they made during much of the twentieth century as they agitated to increase their involvement and influence within structures of international governance. She focuses on the work of liberal international feminist organizations led by middle- and upper-class Western women, such as the World Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), because these Western-led organizations determined the actions and agenda of the global feminist movement from the 1920s until the 1980s. The years 1925 and 1985 are bookends of the study. Their significance stems from the fact that 1925 saw the founding of the Joint Standing Committee of Women's International Organizations, which heralded a new day in the cooperative efforts of women in global politics, while 1985 marked the end of the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women and the emergence of clear challenges to Western dominance by feminist voices from other parts of the world.

‘Didi, are you Hindu?’ Politics of Secularism in Women's Activism in India: Case-study of a grassroots women's organization in rural Uttar Pradesh

AbstractIn this paper I take the women's movement as the site for unpacking some of the strains and tensions involved in practical interpretations of secularism in present-day India. Several sources within and outside the movement point out that there has been a tendency to take the existence of secularism for granted, and that the supposedly secular idioms and symbols used for mobilizing women have been drawn from Hindu religio-cultural sources. Women from Dalit and religious minority communities have felt alienated by this. Hindu nationalists have cleverly appropriated these idioms and symbols to mobilize women as foot soldiers to further religious nationalism. Through a case-study of a grassroots women's NGO working in Uttar Pradesh, I seek to explore how women's organizations may be reshaping their agendas and activism to address this issue. Specifically, I will examine how and why the 2002 Gujarat riots affected the NGO, the ways in which it has started working on the issue of communal harmony and engaging with Muslims since the riots, and the challenges with which it has been confronted as a result of its efforts. In doing so, I will show how the complexities of NGO-based women's activism have become intertwined with the politics of secularism.

Representation and beyond; Female victims in Post-Suharto media

This study analyses representations of female victims in post-Suharto media. In so doing, it underlines the import of the fall of the New Order regime and the concurrent opening up of the media world in Indonesia. The study is based on notably influential issues that emerged among media producers, feminist activists, social scientists, policy makers, and general audiences during the period of study (1998-2004). Based on observations made in women's NGOs and other institutions concerned with women, interviews and informal conversations with individuals engaged in projects related to female mediation, and content analysis of a large number of mainstream and alternative media presentations, this study finds that the context of the reform (reformasi) in Indonesia constituted a major factor in influencing the changes that affected women and the media, and more importantly, on the burgeoning of the discourse of female victimization. This study also addresses the concepts of ideology, interpellation, identity, and agency to show how the media culture during the reform period, or rather the cultural producers during that time, constructed female victims' identities by sorting out and selecting the representations that represented the context and the history of the regime's change

‘It's not right!’: Death as Gendered Experience in Contemporary South Africa

This article examines how the concept of ‘not-rightness’ is embedded in African women's talk and sense-making about death in present-day urban South Africa. Moving from a Christian NGO context in Pretoria's inner city to the surrounding townships, it focuses on the ways women NGO workers engage with notions of rights, empowerment and behavioural change in their concurrent roles as kin, burial society members, widows and lovers of deceased persons. It argues that the senses of not-rightness women express in relation to these gendered roles are newly animated by South Africa's turn to democracy and the dramatic impact of HIV/AIDS; senses which, if subtly, speak to locally salient, vernacularised conceptions of ‘women's rights’ and ‘fidelity’. Through two case studies – the first of the death of an elderly woman; the second of the murder of an interlocutor's boyfriend – the article elucidates the central role of death experiences in women's (re)conceptualisations of gender identity and subjectivity in the post-apartheid moment. More broadly, it reiterates the need to move beyond questions of the limits of rights-based rhetoric to analyses attentive to the complex, contingent and possibly contradictory ways people evoke such discourses.

Women’s NGOs and Civil Society Building in Bosnia-Herzegovin

Very often conflict and post-conflict images of Bosnia-Herzegovina overshadow noteworthy developments and changes. Similarly the role and contributions of women's NGOs in the process of civil society building don't receive proper publicity and acknowledgment. Therefore, this paper aims to put in the perspective women's NGOs in Bosnia-Herzegovina by providing historical and theoretical analysis of their contributions towards peace-building and elections, state-building and civil society building. Furthermore, this paper aims to analyze origin and developments of gender legal, economic and socio-political framework as such framework is the precondition for actual application and achievement of gender equality. Finally, this paper applies theoretical framework of civil society functions on leading women's NGOs. The author uses ethnographic methodology, written sources, NGO and governmental reports and gender related laws. The results of this paper indicate that women's NGO's in Bosnia-Herzegovina made significant progress from providing mere humanitarian services to the establishment of gender institutional, legal, economic and socio-political framework. Such progress placed women's NGOs at the position of application and achievement of gender equality in Bosnia-Herzegovina. With regards to the fulfillment of civil society functions, results indicate that women's NGO's made significant achievements in advocating values of human rights, tolerance and understanding, offering civic training, promoting civic education and public issues through media, and promotion of conflict resolution and inter-faith dialogue. However, civil society functions such as control of political power, monitoring of political participation and elections and promoting of anti-corruption awareness don't indicate significant involvement of women's NGOs.

Promoting Democracy in Postcommunist Ukraine: The Contradictory Outcomes of US Aid to Women's NGOs. By Kateryna Pishchikova. Boulder, Colo.: First Forum Press, 2011. viii, 237 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $65.00, hard bound.

Promoting Democracy in Postcommunist Ukraine: The Contradictory Outcomes of US Aid to Women's NGOs. By Kateryna Pishchikova. Boulder, Colo.: First Forum Press, 2011. viii, 237 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $65.00, hard bound. - Volume 71 Issue 1