Brand focuses on three countries--Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco--with special attention to issues such as access to contraception and abortion, labor, pension, criminal legislation, protection against harassment and violence, and the degree of women's participation in government.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Liberation from Liberalization challenges the neo-liberal claim that free market policies bring prosperity and economic development. Bahramitash focuses particularly on Southeast Asia, where expansion of free markets has led to high GNP per capita growth over the past few decades. Focusing on this region, the book examines the economic policies adopted in Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Drawing upon state-centred theories, the author argues that limiting the role of the state has been responsible for growing poverty, especially among women. Seventy percent of those earning less than a dollar a day are women, and poverty among rural women is growing much faster than it is among men. In order to reverse economic liberalization, the state has to be brought back into the economy as a major player and become responsible for providing welfare for its citizens. This volume argues in favour of a system that incorporates women's groups into the decision-making process of the state, while ensuring that the state remain both transparent and subject to the political advocacy of its citizens. Bahramitash argues that, ultimately, the only way to stop liberalization, which is trapping millions in poverty, is to limit the role of markets through an elected and responsible state with embedded members of civil society, such as women's groups.

This book examines women, money, and political participation in the Middle East and North Africa focusing on women’s capacity to engage local political systems. In particular, it considers whether and how this engagement is facilitated through specific types of financial flows from abroad. Arab countries are well-known rentier states, and so a prime destination for foreign aid, worker remittances, and oil-related investment. Alongside other factors these external monies have elicited dramatic shifts in gender-related social norms and expectations both from the state and the domestic population, affording certain women the opportunity to enter the political arena, while leaving others behind. The research presented here expands the discussion of women in rentier political economy and highlights their roles as participants and agents within regional templates for economic development.

Synthesizing the results of the extensive research on women and gender done over the last twenty years, Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker provide an accessible overview of the scholarship on women and gender in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. The book is organized along thematic lines that reflect major focuses of research in this area—gender and work, gender and the state, gender and law, gender and religion, and feminist movements—and each chapter is written by a scholar who has done original research on the topic.

This book is about power. The power wielded over others – by absolute monarchs, tyrannical totalitarian regimes and military occupiers – and the power of the people who resist and deny their rulers' claims to that authority by whatever means. The extraordinary events in the Middle East in 2011 offered a vivid example of how non-violent demonstration can topple seemingly invincible rulers. This book considers the ways in which the people have united to unseat their oppressors and fight against the status quo and probes the relationship between power and forms of resistance. It also examines how common experiences of violence and repression create new collective identities. This brilliant, yet unsettling book affords a panoramic view of the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East through occupation, oppression and political resistance.

This is the first book to analyse the complexities of women's political participation on a cross-national scale and from a feminist perspective. Surveying forty-three countries, chosen to represent a variety of political systems, regions, and levels of ecomic development, questions of women's status, power, means, and methods of reform, are addressed on a global scale. Includes chapters on the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia(former), Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Rebpublic of(South Korea), Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, The Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Peru, The Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Turkey, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(former), United States, Uruguay.