Reviving Pan-Arabism in Feminist Activism in the Middle East

This essay is a preliminary attempt to explore the potential of a feminist, Pan-Arab ideology in relieving some of the tensions in feminist movement building in the Middle East and North Africa region. In its current formulation, regional feminisms suffer from compounded inefficiencies due to fragmentations in grassroots, civil society organizing; an overreliance on the state and state actors including NGOs and discourses of neoliberal development; and a narrow focus on a human rights approach for feminist action. Nonetheless, the present also offers a number of opportunities that are often omitted in our analysis of these disabling tensions. These include women’s growing salience and their increasing presence in public, political spaces of mobilizing, organizing and resistance, which has facilitated communication and negotiation with and within state apparatuses. Opportunities also exist thanks to the enabling and connective nature of the Internet for the purpose of transnational feminist organizing. Crucially, it is the idea that a single, organized and unified movement will gather more support, and collect greater influence than would be the case if these movements remained in their divided and atomized states. Ultimately, this piece is an exercise of feminist imagination – one that envisions the ways in which a regional feminism can emerge based on an active struggle against patriarchy in all its manifestations.