Founder and President of Women’s Learning Partnership, Executive
Director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies and former Minister of State for Women’s Affairs in Iran
Author of the best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a visiting scholar at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at Johns Hopkins University
Across the Middle East region, women are using grassroots-based, bottom-up, culture-specific methods to reform policies and legislation to ensure gender equality and social justice. Women's right to equal citizenship is guaranteed by the majority of constitutions in Arab countries, as well as by international law. In many countries in the region, however, women are denied their right to nationality–a crucial component of citizenship. Women in the region who marry men of other nationalities cannot confer their nationality on their husbands or children.
These laws undermine women’s status as equal citizens in their home countries, preventing them from participating fully in public life. On September 6th, Women’s Learning Partnership will convene a panel discussion and launch an international campaign in support of a seven-country regional campaign for Arab
women’s right to nationality in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria.
From March 10–21, 2025, government officials, international policy leaders, and civil society activists will gather in New York for the 69th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69). During the session, Member States will assess the challenges affecting the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the progress toward gender equality, women's empowerment, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This lecture, co-sponsored by Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and Women's Learning Partnership (WLP) in partnership with several other feminist organizations, and co-hosted by McGill University’s Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, is a conversation with renowned feminist Charlotte Bunch on navigating the current era of global backlash against women's rights.
