Democratisation & Human Rights

It has been nearly a decade since Lebanese citizens last had the opportunity to go to the polls and cast their votes. The current parliament had been extending its mandate on three separate occasions mainly due to several reasons starting from not agreeing on a new electoral law to the ongoing war in neighboring Syria. Finally, in summer of 2017 a proportional law was agreed on and elections finally will be held on May 6 of this year. With elections approaching we have put together this dossier that would help the voter keep track of everything they need to know about the elections.

The sixth issue of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, "Sex, Desire, and Intimacy," vol. 3, no. 2 is now Online.

The Ba’ath regime in Syria has never truly resolved the national debate over how to maintain the secular nature of the state. Constant assertions of its secularism in official and media discourses are at odds with the actions of the state and the manner in which the country is run. The Ba’ath Party itself, which has ruled the country for the past half century, pretends to be proud of its secular constitution; however, the party has never managed to persuade anyone that it is a genuinely secular organisation. In the 1980s, while militiamen loyal to the current president’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, were ripping the hijab from the heads of women in the capital, Syrian television continued to broadcast the Friday prayers every week. In the 1990s, even as thousands of Islamists crowded into the regime’s prisons, the number of mosques was on the rise. State security-run al-Assad Institutes for Qur’an Memorization were opening their doors to new students - a large proportion of which are now in 2016 fighting with Islamist groups against the regime in Damascus.

These days, to ask what effect the Arab Spring had on women is to pose a question which seems ridiculous, irrelevant almost, given the bloody and brutal outcomes of revolutions in countries such as Syria, Libya and Yemen, and the ongoing repercussions of the uprising in Egypt, which leave no room for doubt that the dreams of the millions who demonstrated in Egypt's Tahrir Square in 2011 chanting ‘Bread, Liberty and Social Justice’ and calling for ‘Dignity and Freedom’ widespread in Syria, Libya and Yemen, have become terrifying nightmares which have touched on the lives of all members of society. But the progressive feminist movement across the Middle East is recovering from a particularly traumatic ride, and are finding they are being forced to fight again on issues which were on the table at the very birth of the movement and were felt by many to have been reconciled.

Immediately after we’d finished discussing the challenges facing Aleppo in front of a large audience I was asked by a friend of mine, a leading figure in the Syrian civil society movement, how I was able to appear so unmoved, without anger or emotion, even when talking about the most painful experiences of my life and my losses, such as my mother being martyred; the interrogations I had faced, or other similar incidents, experienced by all Syrian activists such as myself. Sometimes, he said, he was afraid he might one day break down on stage and they’d say ‘Those Syrians! Babies. So emotional!’