Sohela Nazneen - Voicing Demands: Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts

Disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions, this expert series redefines issues at the heart of todays feminist contestations in a development context. Bringing together a formidable collective of thinkers from the Global South and the North, it explores what it is that can bring about positive changes in womens rights and realities.

These timely and topical collections reposition feminism within development studies, bringing into view substantial commonalities across the countries of the Global South that have so far gone unrecognized.

Series editor

Andrea Cornwall

Forthcoming titles

Feminisms, Empowerment and Development:
Changing Womens Lives
Andrea Cornwall and Jenny Edwards

Changing Narratives of Sexuality:
Contestations, Compliance and Womens Empowerment
Charmaine Pereira

Women in Politics:
Gender, Power and Development
Maria Tadros

About the Editors

Sohela Nazneen is a professor of international relations at University of Dhaka and a lead researcher at the BRAC Development Institute, BRAC University, Bangladesh. She has a PhD in development studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Her research focuses on institutional analysis of gender, particularly in the areas of governance, rural and urban livelihoods, and feminist movements. She is currently leading research on gender and political settlement in selected South Asian and sub-Saharan African countries for the Effective States and Inclusive Development RPC, based at the University of Manchester. Sohela has published many articles and book chapters in her subject areas.

Maheen Sultan is one of the founders of the Centre for Gender and Social Transformation at the BRAC Development Institute, BRAC University, a regional centre on research, teaching and policy related to gender and social transformation. She is a development practitioner with over 25 years experience working for NGOs, donors, the UN, Grameen Bank and the Bangladeshi government in a range of capacities, from direct programme management to policy formulation. She has worked on issues of social development, poverty, civil society and community participation, and gender equality in various capacities including a close engagement with government structures in the post-Beijing conference period when her work addressed gender mainstreaming and CEDAW reporting. Maheen is a member of Naripokkho, a Bangladeshi womens activist organization, a board member of Caritas Bangladesh and Utsho Bangladesh, and the chairperson of the ADB External Forum on Gender and Development. She co-edited Mapping Womens Empowerment: Experiences from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (2009).

Voicing Demands

Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts

edited by

Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan

Zed Books

LONDON & NEW YORK

Voicing Demands: Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts was first published in 2014 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

This ebook edition was first published in 2014

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Editorial copyright Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan 2014

Copyright in this collection Zed Books 2014

The rights of Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Designed and typeset in Monotype Bembo by Kate Kirkwood

Index by John Barker

Cover design: www.alice-marwick.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 978 1 78032 970 3

Contents

This book has evolved over three years. We are deeply indebted to our contributors as they stayed with us and engaged with our ideas enthusiastically over this time. Without Andrea Cornwalls initial idea and tireless persistence, the book would not have been written. We arranged a conference on feminist voice at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, where the authors presented their first drafts in November 2009. We are indebted to the Rockefeller Center for hosting us. Our resource persons at this workshop Sonia Alvarez, Adrian Leftwich and Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay provided incisive comments and enriched our understanding. We were helped along by a host of brilliant scholars. Deniz Kandiyoti, Rema Hammami, Saba Gul Khattak, Rounaq Jahan, Zakia Salime, Amanda Gouws, Jussara Pr and Adrian Leftwich reviewed our country chapters and provided useful comments. Dzodzi Tsikata, Aurora Vergara Figueroa and Charmaine Pereira participated in the Bellagio conference and enriched our discussions. Initial discussions with John Gaventa, Peter Houtzager and Anne Marie Goetz during Sohelas stint as a visiting fellow at IDS, University of Sussex, pushed us to ask what this book might contribute to the wider political science, social movement and development policy literature. Shanti Mahendra and Jenny Edwards meticulously copy-edited the manuscript. We are grateful to our editor Kim Walker and the publishing team at Zed Books. We thank the University of Dhaka for granting leave of absence to Sohela to take up her summer fellowship at IDS. We thank the BRAC Development Institute (BDI), BRAC University and the Pathways of Womens Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (funded by the UK Department for International Development, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Sida) for creating space for this work. Our families mothers, husbands, children (Maheen), nephews and nieces (Sohela), siblings and in-laws provided invaluable support and were willing to forego our company at various times. This book is dedicated to our parents: our fathers, Muzaffer Ahmad and Muhammed Sultan, for nurturing our voices even when they were at times in disagreement with what the book has to say; and our mothers, Roushan Jahan and Ruby Sultan, for teaching us the value of having a voice.