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  • What will it take for women to win?

    13/11/2018

    Today Lebanese women are more politically mobilised than they have ever been. 113 female candidates braved a hostile patriarchal political system, a privatised partisan media and skeptical voters to run for office on 6 May 2018. It was a singular achievement in a country which ranks near bottom (no. 137 out of 144) in the global gender gap index1 - in 2009 only 12 women ran for seats in the previous election.

  • Role of Facebook in Youth Participation in Local Elections in Jordan 2017

    14/11/2018

    On 15 August 2017, Jordanians participated in the first decentralized elections along with municipal elections. The occasion was considered a momentous political transformation, following calls by young people and civil society to distribute political and economic pressure equally among governorates instead of being concentrated in the capital. It also allowed young people over 25 to run as candidates for the very first time.

  • fi Dam baynatna – There is blood between us

    14/11/2018

    As a young citizen participating for the first time in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, I was able to see first hand through the members of my family/electoral, how familial power structures, intersecting with gender and class, affected voting behaviour in Lebanon.

  • Jordanian feminist movement and the struggle for social and political change: achievements and challenges

    15/11/2018

    Most scholars and advocates would argue that the emergence of the Jordanian Women’s Movement dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. For example, Nicola Pratt, argues that “women in Jordan have a long history of public work which dates back prior to the founding of the Jordanian state in 1920s”,1 and this work in its early stages was limited to the provision of humanitarian assistance to poor and needy people in most parts of the Kingdom.

  • Obstacles faced by female candidates in political elections

    16/11/2018

    The first parliamentary elections in Lebanon since 2009 saw a record number of female candidates running in the history of the country. While the major increase in the number of female candidates marks a step forward towards their participation in decision-making processes, several structural changes need to be fulfilled for women to be able to take on positions of power in Lebanon.

  • Privacy protection as a core human rights issue for women in Jordan

    16/11/2018

    Last May, an anonymous group of Jordanian activists publicly issued what they titled “The Privacy Statement”. This statement primarily called for civil society and public support for a legal framework that would protect the privacy of all members of society, especially women. The statement was issued in the backdrop of a leaked recording that allegedly revealed a powerful official in the Jordan Royal Guard blackmailing and sexually assaulting a woman. The leak and subsequent discussions have illuminated the vulnerability of women in Jordanian society, and the resonance of the case is a testament to the prevalence of this issue. The female victim—despite being blackmailed and repeatedly threatened—was surprisingly regarded as the main offender since women are not supposed to talk to unfamiliar men in the first place, although in the case of this particular woman the details were not fully revealed and the public based their opinions—widely expressed on social media platforms—on conjecture and assumption.