A Gendered Approach to Sectarianism

Abstract

Women's civil society and non-governmental organizations in Lebanon constantly advocate for the enactment of gender-responsive legislations, specifically those pertaining to personal status, gender quota, and nationality laws, claiming that the enactment of these legislations ensure political inclusion, rights, and gender equality. However, achieving gender equality appears to go beyond legislation and the legal framework while being faced with various impediments and barriers on the political, societal, and cultural levels that this thesis aims to explore. Gender-responsive legislations proved to be effective in European consociational systems such as in Switzerland and Belgium, where women reached a significant level of substantial equality. However, European consociationalism is based on ethnic and linguistic cleavages rather than religious divisions. Meanwhile, the enactment of gender-responsive legislations in Iraq’s sectarian-based consociational system did not lead to substantial improvement in women’s social and political standing. Hence, this study aspires to reveal why consociationalism succeeded in the effective empowering of gender legislations in the classic European consociations but not in Iraq. Is the problem with the primordial religious identities and laws that fundamentally discriminate against women or is it that political arrangement that should be blamed? Moreover, this thesis endeavors to investigate the extent to which the enactment of gender-responsive legislations in Lebanon’s sectarian-based consociational system can effectively advance women’s rights, and thus infer what is the way forward to substantially improve gender equality in a sectarian context. To offer such an assessment, this study comparatively reflects on the experience of gender-responsive legislations in the secular consociations of Switzerland and Belgium and the sectarian consociation of Iraq.