Gender and Social Policy: Family Law and Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Middle East

Abstract

This article examines the gendered nature of social policy and its evolution since the 1950s in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It argues that the MENA region’s experience with development and social policy, and the gender dynamics of these processes and policies, were greatly influenced by the imperatives of state- and nation-building, by the characteristics of the regional oil economy, and by the rentier and neopatriarchal nature of the states. The article also draws attention to how family law as a social policy has had implications for social development and for women’s economic citizenship. While analyzing the specificities of the gender/social policy regime for the region as a whole, it highlights and compares the cases of Iran, Jordan, and Tunisia.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.