Women, Power, and Gender in the Middle East

This book examines the mechanisms through which gendered authority is both enforced and contested within evolving structures of governance, addressing a central question: how are women’s rights shaped, constrained, and negotiated under conditions of political instability, authoritarian reform, and state fragmentation?

Women, Power, and Gender in the Middle East examines the mechanisms through which gendered authority is both enforced and contested within evolving structures of governance, addressing a central question: how are women’s rights shaped, constrained, and negotiated under conditions of political instability, authoritarian reform, and state fragmentation?The volume covers Turkey, Iran, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, North and East Syria (Rojava), the United Arab Emirates, and the Maghreb. Drawing on qualitative interviews, field research, legal and policy analysis, and feminist political theory, contributors analyse a range of issues, including honour-based violence, women’s movements, state-led reform, the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the Iranian MeToo mobilisation, reproductive labour and surrogacy, and processes of racialisation and individuation. The volume moves beyond reductive culturalist explanations of gender, conceptualising gendered violence, reform, and mobilisation as interrelated dimensions of governance and political transformation. By bringing together grassroots activism, institutional change, and everyday regulatory practices within a unified analytical framework, the book advances a more nuanced understanding of how gender is constituted in relation to state power and authority. This volume is an essential resource for scholars and students of gender studies and Middle East studies, as well as for policymakers and practitioners seeking rigorous, empirically grounded insight into the intersection of governance and gender in contemporary regional politics. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.