*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Women Don’t Need U.S. Assistance to Mobilize: Egypt
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- U.S. Programs Targeting Women’s Role Flawed
Women Don’t Need U.S. Assistance to Mobilize: EgyptEGYPTIAN WOMEN MOBILIZED DESPITE LACK OF ASSISTANCE Judith Cochran, Education Professor-University of Missouri, 2011, Democracy in the Middle East: the impact of religion and education, p. 79 Egyptian women received little of the foreign aid from the United States and other sources, and yet they are members of the grass roots, democratic protests that began January 25, 2011, removing the 30-year, stagnant, military rule of President Hosni Mubarak. EGYPTIAN WOMEN HAVE BEEN MOBILIZED FOR A CENTURY TO MEET EDUCATION AND SOCIAL SERVICE NEEDS Judith Cochran, Education Professor-University of Missouri, 2011, Democracy in the Middle East: the impact of religion and education, p. 88 The image of Egyptian women changed with nationalism and the accompanying expansion of education to all children. Women left the isolation of their homes and moved into the public sector where they developed organizations that started schools, service projects and increased political knowledge. Egyptian women started and financed the first elementary and secondary schools for girls. Together with the men, women protested and fought for Egypt’s freedom from Britain including demands for rights to free education for all females. The first schools for poor women were started by wealthy women in the Egyptian Feminist Union. The Union also provided day care and improved health education for women and their families. After its independence, the country controlled its own educational system. Females and males were given free, unlimited education through the doctorate, if they qualified for admission with their scores on entrance tests. This egalitarian system also guaranteed employment in the government to males and females upon graduation. In spite of gender-based occupational restrictions, more women became lawyers, engineers and doctors than in developed, capitalistic countries. MANY MIDEAST COUNTRIES GRANT WOMEN EQUAL EDUCATION RIGHTS Judith Cochran, Education Professor-University of Missouri, 2011, Democracy in the Middle East: the impact of religion and education, p. 216 Fortunately, Islam emphasizes education for all, including women, despite their assumed sexual allure. As a result of their emphasis on the egalitarianism of the Muslim religion, the Islamic Republic of Iran increased the number of schools for girls. Girls graduated from these schools and qualified for entrance into the Universities. Now the universities of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine are filled with females, who constitute sixty percent of the students. Egypt is the only exception to this increase of women in higher education. Equal access to education for all following Islamic and democratic values has resulted in more women getting higher education degrees than men.
Marina Ottaway, Carnegie Endowment, 2005, Unchartered Journey: promoting democracy in the middle east, eds. T. Carothers & M. Ottaway, p. 116-7 Promotion of women’s rights in the Middle East is an easy goal for the United States to announce. It lends itself too resounding rhetorical statements. It can be translated in practice into many concrete, small projects that are not seen as threatening by most Arab regimes and are even welcomed by them as a means to demonstrate their willingness to democratize and modernize. An improvement in the rights of women does not threaten the power of the incumbent authoritarian government in the same way as free elections or a free press would. Except in Saudi Arabia, Arab leaders and opposition political parties alike, including all but the most fundamentalist Islamic organizations, gladly embrace the rhetoric of women’s rights. Many governments are even willing to take small concrete steps, such as appointing the occasional woman to a high, visible position, or introducing amendments to divorce of family laws. For the United States and other democracy-promoting countries, women’s programs have the added advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to implement – for example, encouraging schooling for girls, financing women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or providing training for women’s candidates in countries where women can run for office. The popularity of the women’s rights cause and its obvious intrinsic merit have unfortunately generated many facile assumptions and much confusion about the conditions of women in the Middle East and the problems they face; about the relationship between women’s rights and democracy; and about what an outside intervener like the United States can accomplish. This chapter seeks to clarify some of these issues. It fully accepts the dominant assumptions that the rights of Arab women are not sufficiently protected in the Arab world; that social norms preclude women from fully enjoying even their limited legal rights; that this holds back the entire society; and that the United States should be concerned about the problem and contribute to its solution. It cautions, however, against the assumption that by promoting women’s rights the United States contributes to the democratization of the Arab world, and it calls for a cleaner separation of programs promoting the rights of women and opportunities for them and those promoting democracy. EXTERNAL SUPPORT TO INCREASE WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION ENTRENCHES POWER STRUCTURES, DISEMPOWERS WOMEN Denise M. Horn, Professor International Studies-Northeastern University, 2010, Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization, p. 15-6 The effects of foreign funding on women’s participation in civil society cannot be discussed without also pointing to the normative questions at stake. The emphasis on product rather than process constrains NGOs in the programs they may offer, as well as affecting their ability to “change power structures or dominant social values [which] cannot easily be quantified through standard evaluation procedures to fit neatly into a project report for a funding agency or government. The bureaucratic propensity for quantification illustrates the limiting power of gatekeeping: rather than empowering local NGOs as “norm entrepreneurs,” a hegemonic democratic state is more inclined to pursue a strategy that constructs and “counts” the success of its policies inasmuch as the results reflect its own values, creating policies that (counter-intuitively) disempower the targets of its policies. According to Peter Burnell, “strategic thinking” on the part of “norm entrepreneurs” involves utilizing international norms as tools and solutions (if there are any), and would be based upon policies that “give priority to reconsidering the international legal framework for supporting democratization, address all the relevant normative issues, and proceed to place issue of strategy on a much firmer and transparent normative and legal base. U.S. DEMOCRATIZATION POLICIES GROUNDED IN FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WOMEN Denise M. Horn, Professor International Studies-Northeastern University, 2010, Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization, p. 16 US and Western European assumptions about the role of gender in democratization processes can be problematic once implementation has begun. In the case of the former Soviet states, gender integration and talk of gender equality has been widely viewed as a remnant of their communist past where “equality” reflected superficial efforts to maintain women in the workplace while also expecting them to carry the domestic burden. US and EU democratization policies are based upon a new-liberal economic model that actually serves to reinforce this relationship, thus serving to undermine any efforts at “gender equality” that might be implicitly (or explicitly) embedded in their policies. 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