Women Are Citizens Too: The Laws of the State, The Lives of Women
Author: Nadia Hijab (Regional Bureau for Arab States, United Nations Development Programme)
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Excerpt from Introduction
The concept of citizenship is a central and mandatory concept for the modern nation state and is thus essential for any discussion of governance and gender. The concept of citizenship entails a direct and legal relationship between the individual and the state, a relationship that carries with it obligations and enforceable rights as defined by juridical processes. As an area of study, citizenship has gained increased importance in recent years due to increasing challenges to the very viability and basis of current nation states as a result of pressures from both below (in the form of ethnic or religious movements at the sub-national level), as well as from above (in the form of processes of regional integration and globalization).
The notion of citizenship is conceptually appealing because it significantly broadens the debate on gender, allowing us to go beyond traditional discussions of “women’s issues” or “women in parliament”, to more fundamental discussions about the nature of the State and Politics in the Arab world. State legislation delineates and regulates the rights and responsibilities of citizens and rules by which one becomes a citizen, by which citizenship is passed on to children and spouses, and by which citizenship can be withdrawn. As the recent authoritative volume by Joseph (2000) clearly indicates, a citizenship framework also broadens the discussions to address crucial issues such as the place of family, and kinship ties in the social fabric, the extent to which kin-based formations are integrated into the modern political order, and the impact this has on the construction of citizenships in the Arab world.