Women’s expectations and disappointments of the Arab Spring : a closer look at women’s political and social roles in Egypt and Tunisia

Abstract

This dissertation sets out the development of women’s empowerment before and after the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, in order to see how women’s rights and political empowerment have progressed during the period of political transformation and which roles the transitional state reserved for them in the respective countries. This dissertation seeks to find out to what extent the states in the post- Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak and post Zine El Abidine Ben Ali Ben Ali era provided the possibility for women to participate in political life in the transitions towards a more democratic regime, and how secular and Islamic women’s organizations are now mobilizing to oppose the regime’s hegemonic dialogue and hence achieve improvement in women’s rights and political participation. A closer look at past and new women’s movements, women’s current position on the Global Gender Gap Index, their constitutional rights and the impediments they are currently facing within the political and social spheres is taken. This Dissertation locates the Tunisian case study and the Egyptian case study in an analytical framework derived from a brief comparative analysis of women’s activism in revolutionary struggles of the post-independence and post-Arab spring movements and their relations to the state.