Women, Globalization and Civil Society in the MENA Area: Between Marginalization and Radicalization

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (JBNES) is an English language journal for the study of the complex historical, economic, political, diplomatic, cultural and security issues that confront the region of the Balkans and the Near East. JBNES constructs an academic forum to bring together disparate scholarly perspectives and publishes research on the nation-states of the Ballkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Caucasus, from 1945 to the present day. The journal encourages historical research, comparative approaches, critical scholarship and a diversity of international relations, political economy and geo-political/geo-strategic views on the region.This article forms part of a special issue: Women in the Mediterranean.

Abstract:

This article analyses the condition of women in the MENA area in the light of the challenges faced by those countries within the context of globalization.

It argues that, if the position of the MENA countries in the global political economy is increasingly marginalized, this is even truer for women, who are left behind in the process of up-skilling necessary to catch up with the increasing technological demands imposed by globalization.

Moreover, the crisis of the Arab state within globalization seems to produce an increasing radicalization of society, with all that this means in terms of further marginalization of women. In this article a transnationalist conceptualization of globalization is adopted.