 Okay, good evening everyone. Welcome to this Tuesday event lecture or seminar by professor Ailey Marie Tripp. Really welcome to have you here. And she is, I'm just going to give a short bio and let her speak because her topic is very exciting, which is around women's rights adoption of women's rights discourse in, you know, in some parts of the Arab world, but with a focus on North Africa, if I'm not wrong. So, Ailey, a professor Tripp has a long and illustrious career. She is the one Gary Mathie professor of political science and gender and women studies at Wisconsin Medicine University. She works and she researches women and politics in Africa, women's movements in Africa, African politics, and also the informal economy in Africa. And she has published widely and she and her work is award winning work, but her major publications are books, women and politics in Uganda, Mussolini's Uganda paradoxes of power in hybrid in a hybrid regime, and women and power in post conflict Africa. But today she's going to talk to us more in relation to the Middle East and North Africa, and the question of women's rights, and she will be giving a presentation and if I may ask for you to put here for all the participants to put their questions in the question and answer, and then I will pose them to Ailey. So this is the fifth lecture in term two of a series of lectures and seminars that we hold and is hosted by the so as Middle East Institute, and I co chair it with my colleague, Nergis Ferser, who is the chair of the Center for Iranian Studies, and I am the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies and my name is Dina matter and I also work at so as. So welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us and looking forward to this exciting presentation. Welcome, Ailey. Thank you very much. I'm just going to get this going here. Make sure I have it. Here we go. Okay, so thank you very much for the invitation. And I'm delighted to be speaking to you in London. Wish I could be there but another time. I've heard from other people who've spoken at your seminar that it's a wonderful place to present because you get such excellent feedback so I'm very much looking forward to your, your input. So today, I'm talking about a book that I just completed recently called seeking legitimacy why Arab autocracies adopt women's rights. And one of the overarching questions that I've been asking in my work in Africa, North and South and Sub-Saharan Africa is why are some countries more keen to adopt women's rights and law and women's laws and policies, women's rights laws and policies than other countries. And in this book I'm asking the same question, because women's rights are generally associated much more with democracies. And yet we have reforms taking place in autocratic countries as well. I'm asking, in particular, why do we see divergent trends between the Maghreb countries and by here I'm referring to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in this talk although sometimes people include also Libya and Mauritania but this book I'm looking at these three countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. And so I'm asking why do we see divergent trends between these three countries and the Middle East, when it comes to women's rights. And, of course, it's not like there's nothing, I mean obviously there's plenty happening in the Middle East and there are many reforms taking place and we just saw the United Arab Emirates has increased the representation of women in their Federal National Council and their legislative body by up to 50%, which is a big jump from the previous 22%. So you see, you know you're seeing reforms taking place elsewhere. But in general, I am arguing that there's quite a big difference between these groups of countries. When I talk about just to define a few terms here. When I talk about, let me see, when I talk about women's rights, I'm talking about, I'm talking about them as how they're defined by women's movements within these countries so that's my reference point. And I'm drawing on two original databases. One on women's women's rights and constitutions in the MENA region from 1950 to 2018. And then also I draw on interviews that I did between 2015 and 2017 in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. And I did these with leaders of various variety of organizations, Islamists, feminists, Amazir, human rights groups, members of parliament, leaders of women's legislative caucuses, party leaders, religious leaders, lawyers and so on, journalists. And so very quickly, just to get to the answer to my question when I'm going to spend the rest of the time elaborating, but basically my argument in the nutshell is that it has to do with activism by women's rights organizations that took advantage of critical junctures. After there was a change of leadership or some kind of social upheaval they took advantage of these moments to assert their demands. And the other part of the explanation has to do with the ways in which the leaders in these countries used women's rights kind of an instrumental way as an internal strategy to neutralize extremist Islamist elements or movements. And I also did it for the purpose of presenting a modernizing image of their countries to the world so that it had this internal and external objective. So that's that's my argument in a nutshell just so you know where I'm hitting with this. Generally, and I know that most of you study this region so it's, I don't want to go into any great detail here but generally the Margaret and the Middle East share much in common, even though I'm talking about the divergence today but they share common historical influences, colonial influences, they share a similar language Arabic, and they have a dominant religion, they share the Islam religion, they experienced the spread of conservative Islam in recent decades. And they also share with Middle East, some common cultural practices like a cousin marriage. But there's also there are also some important major differences. The Berber or the Amazir culture as they refer to it is something that is is more specific to the demographic. So, maybe a good place to start is what is in what does the literature say about these issues, and very generally, there are many of the existing explanations at least in my field of political science have to do with Islam and and one of the main explanations has come from Ron Engelhardt and Pippa Norris who argued that it's Islam and autocracy that work together to impede the progress and women's rights or to challenge progress. But what we see in these countries, these Margaret countries is that you have considerable reform in women's rights. And so that requires more explanation than just saying okay with writing it off and just saying you know it's there's nothing here. And others like Joseline Cesare have argued that it's really religiously based legislation that contributes to the lack of women's rights in Muslim countries. And in particular, kind of a hegemonic religion where there's a privileging of one religious group over others. And still has to explain why there's so much variance among Muslim countries, if not just in this region but but also elsewhere. And this is in part, you know, much of my interest in this question came from working in Sub-Saharan Africa where you had Muslim countries where some of the leaders in adopting women's rights so it's not it's too simplistic to say that it's just about the hegemonic religion. Dawood Ahmed and Mormon Buddha have also argued that the more, the more the constitutions in Muslim majority countries, the more that they're Islam is sized, the less they advance women's rights, and the less democratic and politically stable they are others in my field have challenged this Daniela Dono and Bruce Russet say that it's not about a talk or see it's not about Islam it's not about Arab culture. No one has to look at the role of religious groups, political actors, how secular the state is the role of international civil conflict. And in my project I'm trying to isolate some of these factors. I draw heavily from the work of Monera Sharad, who has argued that the greater the autonomy of the state from kinship groups. The easier it was to adopt women's policies and she worked in these three, particularly these three same countries. And she's arguing that the more that the state is autonomous from society, and especially from tribal groupings the more you're going to see these reforms as was the case in Tunisia. But again, this may have explained the past but it is something would have had to change in terms of the kinship groups relationship to the state to explain the changes we're seeing today. So and again this this argument maybe goes so far but it doesn't go far enough perhaps to explain what we're seeing now. Finally, there's an argument by dirt to angle angle get and running a Maktabi who have talked about the importance of unified legal systems, unified laws and unified courts in term in implications for reforming family law. And again, I think this is an important argument and it's one that I draw on. You have many countries outside the Margaret Iraq, Kuwait have unified laws and a unified court system you have Libya, Yemen, Oman and Egypt have unified courts but not unified laws. And so you see some of this these patterns but it's it perhaps is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reform so you have to have it, but it's not enough there has to be something else. And I'm building on the unified legal system argument but I think one needs to still go further. So before we, let's see, sorry, jumping around here. It's perhaps important even though I'm generalizing about the Margaret countries. It's important to show that there are differences also between them. In fact, they're quite substantial differences I think people often lump them together but in fact there are quite big historical differences that in fact that affect the women's rights regimes. So in, in the in Morocco you have a monarchy, and you have this king who Mohammed Sadis who think who sees himself as a modernizer as somebody who promotes women's rights human rights. And he, he very much draws on the religious and cultural traditions to legitimate his rule he sees himself he he and his ancestors were in his father and so on before him were the commanders of the commander the faithful. And so he draws on religious symbolism to maintain religious pluralism and to promote women's rights. In particular he's used women's rights as part of a modernizing strategy to moderate the Salafi and Islamist influences. And he's used his religious authority to do that. So, and these use many different mechanisms. Some are constitutional mechanisms but some are also repression of the Salafi inspired violence, offering incentives to nonviolent Salafis, and then engaging in these reforms. Another influence and we don't have much time to go into it but is that Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire and so that has legal implications, you know for the way that the law was family law was was adjudicated. And also it was not part of the African Union until very recently it joined four years ago rejoin, it had been left 30 years ago as a result of some differences over a dispute over Western Sahara. But that also has implications because African Union put certain has had certain goals and targets around women's rights, but that didn't affect Morocco for that time. Algeria was colonized longer than the other two countries and 132 years compared to 40 years with the other two. And it has post of post war legacies to force post war legacies, the first one after the war of independence, and then the second one after the black decade of 1991 to 2002. And I've written a book, an earlier book about the impact of conflict, especially after the 90s, and even more so after 2000 in Africa and how countries that came out of conflict had higher rates of representation of women in parliament they passed more legislation and so on. And so you see some of these post war tendencies that you see them the rest of Africa you see them in Algeria as well. And finally you have Tunisia, which of the three countries is the only democracy, although it's, it's running into some difficulties these days, but it, it had a much more centralized state as I said I mentioned about money restaurants work. And it has a much longer history of women's rights legislation. One of the first things that were given did was to reform the personal status code and improve women's rights in the family. And also, so that was in 1956 right from the get go and he even did that before them before me in the Constitution. 1959 they changed the Constitution and they also increased various women's rights provisions in that. So, you can see that there's big differences within these between these three countries. And having said that, now we're seeing this convert convergence. And you can see it in this chart around women's rights provisions within the Constitution that each country started with minimal provisions and gradually they've all adopted the same types of provisions in the Constitution. The same thing has happened in the laws, you see, initially that with a personal status code but then there's been a diffusion of, of one country adopts one law then the next year, the other country will do the same so you see that with sexual nationality law, photo laws, photos for women in the legislature, violence against women act, the abolition of the rape loophole, and so on. So you have this diffusion of influences within the region. And this is not an accident. Sorry, this is not an accident. Sorry about that. My mouse is a little bit loose today. Oops, I might go in the wrong direction. All right. If you look at kind of the oh here this is one another index or another way of measuring it. The closer you are to one of the greater the discrimination so here again. To compare the light bar is in the least the darker bar is the average for the Margaret countries, you can see differences in terms of family code. This measure is one that combines I'm not very happy with it but it combines law as well as outcomes. So it's not, it's also looking at the impact of the law, not simply the law. So family code. You see the difference physical activity, whether women can travel, for example without permission from a spouse restricted resources and assets is the only one area where you see similarity in terms of the percentage access to to land or property or inheritance. Civil liberties whether women can run for office and so on, and, or rather, to what extent are they succeeding in running for office. And then you see the overall difference so this is quite a big, big gap between the two regions, if you average out the the, the, the index. Perhaps the biggest differences you see in the, in the political arena. And here again if you look the orange line is the Maghreb the blue line is the Middle East, and the gray line is the world. You can see that the the percentage of women in the legislature is is is a quite a big divergence between the Maghreb and the Middle East. And if you look at the local level, you may even see bigger differences in Tunisia, for example, women make up a stunning 37% of the Tunisian Council positions after the 2018 election. It's much higher than the rates in France or Britain or Germany, for example. The Islamist Party had a was elected their first woman mayor into Tunis. At the local level in Morocco also 38% of the communal council seats are held by women. That's, and that was after 2015 and that was three times as many as you had in 2009. Okay, so what then explains the differences. I think people, I mean they came up with a lot of explanations and I think some of them are useful to think about just in terms of, they provide a background for the arguments that I'm going to make they aren't there I wouldn't call these my argument or my reasons but they help, they help explain some things. The explanations people gave me were cultural. So, for example, they talked about the role of the influences of French socialism and French feminism on the women's movements in, in, in these countries as you know there's a lot of back and forth among the elite, or the elite in general, between France and North Africa. And so, and may studied in in France, and elsewhere in Europe but so there was this this kind of influence. Another one that's talked about a lot, especially in Algeria and Morocco was the influence of the rise of the Amazigh dimension or factor dimension as they call it the Berber aspect. This, it's, it's not very tangible but it's something that you still you see a lot in the culture there this is a statue of D here who was, you might know her better as he enough from in Arabic, but D here in Berber or Thomas here was a Amazigh queen warrior who lived in the 7th century in an part of Algeria, and she was, she could have some say she was Jewish some say she was Christian but anyway she was somebody who had twice beat back the Umayyad invaders in this eastern Algeria and Tunisia area. And so today you see all kinds of books about her in the demonstrations they had for the last, you know, in 2019 2020 in Algeria you can see the middle, the middle picture you can see her picture of her. You have restaurants named after her pizza parlors named after her cosmetics I mean everything's story books cartoons every she's very, very popular. And in the imagination and she's not the only one. There's also Tina Hinan, the fourth century to our queen and warrior from the hog our region in Algeria. And there was a Zaynab, Nazouya in the armor, armor rabbits, which is a Berber dynasty that control the Maghreb and Andalus from 1040 to 1147 CE. So and this many others so it but it gives you a sense that there's a sense of it's a it's a secular movement it's a movement that's pushing up against, especially Islamist extremism. And so that's seen that's seen as one aspect and and it's a it's a culture that gives elevates women's women as leaders in a in a particular way. I also heard a lot about the Sufi Sufism and the importance of women, it's a women are cut out of many religious roles but Sufism provides a certain gives them certain central roles in pre Islamic rituals that are associated with healing and fertility. And so it's fairly strong in the Maghreb Sufism and women are given these leadership roles and and in mosques and so we as other kind of religious monasteries. And so it's an area where women can assert their independence and sometimes challenge local patriarchal culture and escape from convention. It's not my argument but I just want to give this these are these explanations they're due because they do infuse the they're the cultural background and the landscape on which I'm talking about. But I will hinge much more of my argument to in terms of women's rights to pressures that from some women's rights organizations. And, in particular, there were several there are many organizations today and in fact the numbers are increasing into country like Tunisia, quite dramatically. But you have this certain kind of inflection certain moments that women have taken advantage of. And they've been able to, sorry, assert themselves. I'm sorry, I don't know why my mouse is just jumping like crazy today. One of the most important early organizations, which helps explain the diffusion of these laws was the collective Maghreb a Galite. Which was an association of women from these three countries that got together and they developed a plan of 100 laws they wanted to change and the laws that you're seeing today they are the ones that they outlined it if they have this playbook and it's amazing to what extent they've actually been able to accomplish the goals that they set for themselves and and made the changes that they they targeted. So it's so that this in part explains, you know, the collaboration between these groups explains why you have the the the synchronicity of these legislative reform. As one Tunisian lawyer and women's rights activists explained, I currently participate in many meetings on law. And when you attend these meetings you realize their approach mom between the Maghreb countries, and the legal difference between the Maghreb and the Middle East. First, the feminist movement appeared almost simultaneously in all three countries. For example, we conducted many meetings together on sexual harassment. These three states at the same time change laws to punish sexual harassment. When we established parity in our electoral law in 2011 in Algeria they modified the Constitution and modified the electoral law to introduce the quota. Morocco introduced parity in the Constitution and laws and so it's moving forward in a convergent way. So, so there you see one piece of the explanation. They took advantage of key moments that I could go through many of them but you know one would have been in Algeria would have been the end of, I mean sorry in Tunisia would have been the end of Ben Ali's rule. And the Arab Spring 2011 and after which they really made big push to get changes to preserve and make changes in the Constitution to preserve their rights and make changes. In Algeria, the push came after the end of the black decade, a very, very brutal war in which, which left many people dead and disappeared. And women suffered very, very, very horrifically in that period, a conflict between the Islamists and the extremists and the government. And then the 20th of February movement in Morocco which was kind of their mini Arab Spring. Again you saw after that changes in the Constitution which affected women and al-Mazir. In my book I talk about to understand why women's rights have been so central in the region and to major developments in the region. I argue that one has to not just look at the events that took place but also look at the symbolic dimension of politics, something that's not done very much in my recent political science. And women's rights in many ways have become a proxy for attitudes towards progress, modernity, secularism, nationalism and democracy. And women and women's bodies often represent attitudes towards sexuality and morality and religious devotion. And so in the region you see many debates going on over how women are dressed. And you have the state regulating in all three countries regulating what women wear they banned the niqab in all three countries or at least the sale of the niqab in the case of Morocco. It's seen as something extremist and foreign. So, you know women are very much at the center of all these of all these battles that are going on. And it's also, you know, one of the things that I was always curious about was that so if you go to like a lecture on women's rights, I was teaching at the al-Hawaiian University in Morocco for a year. And they, the women's rights are, you know, you almost will have more men at an event than women if you're talking about women's rights and I was always curious about why but it's because it, you know, it is this proxy it represents so much more than just it's not just about women it's about all these other, you know, about modernity and about nationalism and secularism and all these other concerns. So this, this comes up a lot in society daily life, just to give one or two examples. There was a woman in Algiers, who was in 2018 who was verbally assaulted and beaten for jogging on the beach during Ramadan. And when she went to the police to complain, they asked, why was she jogging and they blamed her and they did nothing. I just told her to go home. So then she took it to the social media and the next day hundreds of women and men and some NGOs they all came out to run alongside her. So you have these, you know, these kinds of everyday forms of resistance. You also have other other moments. You know, one of the, one of the state itself has has in all these three countries has used a variety of tactics to try to repress extremism. And they've used repression, they've used co-optation, they've used surveillance, and they've used various kinds of accommodation to neutralize extremists. And the use of women and women's rights and women's bodies is also one of these as they've used them as a moderating force. And so, and this has had both problematic but beneficial consequences for women and women's rights and women's rights activists. So for one example here we get it, we draw on the symbolic politics, but there was a man who placed you can see him in the picture there who placed a Daesh flag on top of the University of Manuba. And in response, this 25 year old woman's student climbed up onto the top of the university building and took the flag down and then put the Tunisian flag up. Again, drawing national attention to her active defiance. She was later than honored in a ceremony by the Minister of Interior, who was of the Islamist party, and he called her a symbol of Tunisian women. I'm praising her patriotism and suggesting that the Salafi flag represented a foreign influence that was external or the Daesh flag represented an external influence, a foreign influence that was from outside of Tunisia. So again, you have the symbolic politics and the politics of nationalism being tied to women. So, so leaders, so one of the biggest differences then between the most Margaret, the Margaret countries and most Middle East countries I think Egypt is kind of a, we'll have to talk about that because it's a little bit of an exception here but I don't but I still think what I'm arguing it holds. One of the biggest differences is that these Margaret leaders use women's rights as a strategy to neutralize extremist Islamist movements. And they then at the same time were signaling to the West that they know they have this modernizing image and so on. It's very weird. And so they, they, how am I doing for time. You're okay. Very good. So, for example, they, you know, they released a lot of these Islamist parties you have Islamist parties in power in Morocco and Tunisia they, they realize very quickly that if they were going to have staying power they would have to make concessions in this area. And perhaps they were defensive, but they have now adopted the language of women's rights through a process of what El Hashimi is called political learning. So the party, the PJD, the party of justice and development in Morocco came to power in 2011, and it has made a almost 180 degree turnaround from its opposition to, for example, the reforms of the personal status code that were made in 2004. They had led demonstrations against the reforms in the code, family code, they had issued fatwas against women who were in the activists who are promoting these reforms. But when they became then headed up the coalition government, they changed their position, and it's great, it's changed gradually didn't happen just overnight but it's, but since 2011 you see this, this, this change. They were very much against, for example, the convention on the elimination of discrimination of women's CEDAW. And today they're basically supported, at least verbally. They support the personal status code, and they've continued with their, with the reforms so they didn't just they in fact they went further than Istiklal, the more secular party. They've, when when Istiklal was head of the coalition that made very few reforms around women's rights but under PJD they continued with the electoral law reforms that introduced quotas. They made it introduce anti-trafficking law, violence against women act. They're considering abortion legislation, I don't know how far that will go. They've included protections for domestic workers. They've adopted two European Union funded programs that are quite major in terms of women's policy reforms. So again, a huge, huge shift in terms of how they see women's rights. Now what they mean by all this we can discuss it's not perhaps that, you know, they have may have very different understandings than maybe the some of the secular feminists do. I know they do. But, you know, it is, it is a change. So the big thing with an idea you saw, especially in the debates over the constitutional reforms when the Constitution was being amended and rewritten in 2014 you saw big debates over, especially over, I mean that there are many issues, but one in particular had to do with the complementarity clause. And they wanted to introduce this clause that would more or less suggest that women are competent in their home sphere and men in the public sphere. There was also language that talked about, you know, that Tunisia is part of a sacred country, laws are sacred. And there was a worry that that might introduce a religious element that would then push back and undo some of the laws like the personal status code that had been in effect. And so they were the, the activists, women's rights, activists were able to, to keep those clauses from entering in to the Constitution and they were able to, they ended up with the one of them one of the most progressive constitutions in the world for women. Butiflipa also in Algeria, before he was thrown out of power, he also has used women's rights as part of an act, a means of isolating and neutralizing Islamist extremists and promoting women as leaders. Now the current president just hasn't been visible. He's had COVID for the much of the time he's been in power. So it's hard to evaluate what happened after him, but at least that was the policy up until Butiflipa left office a year and a half ago. So in a nutshell, what we've seen, what I will argue is that the reason for this different divergence between the Maghreb and the Middle East is that there has been a political will of the leaders to neutralize Islamist extremist movements, not to not to neutralize Islamist movements with extremist movements by promoting women's rights. And another piece of this is not such a big piece but another piece of it is also just signal to the international community that they are, you know, moving toward their modern the aggressive and so on. And a lot of it has come from parties recognizing that their political survival was at stake here and that they had to, they would have to make these accommodations in part for international consumption but also for internal reasons. And then, and then this wouldn't have happened without pressure from activists and you need actors to make these things happen. And so these women's activists took advantage of critical junctures to push for these changes. And with a cautionary note about autocrats adopting women's rights policies in which women's rights are instrumental to other purposes may mark symbolic advances, but they also can run the risk of not addressing women's rights concerns. And they can also have problematic unintended consequences of not for example including women representatives in the crafting of policies, or of not of not being developed with the interests of women themselves in mind, if they're being used for some other objective. They're used to divert attention from other human rights violations, and then they can work at cross purposes to women's rights, which are contingent on freedom of association, freedom of speech and free and fair elections, and the right to freely participate in politics. The policies which are enacted for purposes of expediency and a pleasing and external audience may look good on paper, but then they may not be implemented and in fact that's one of the biggest concerns is that very often there's nice policies but there's no funding for them and they're not carried out because they're, you know that people are not serious about really seeing them through always. And then finally, as happened in the case of women who were associated with Ben Ali's regime in Tunisia, women's rights activists who are sometimes associated with autocrats in this way. Even if they themselves are sincere in their goals they may find themselves tainted by association with a corrupt and dictatorial government. That's one of the ones that govern a country democratizes. So, I'll leave it at that and thank you very much for listening and I look forward to your comments and questions.