Although some contemporary Egyptian studies have broached aspects of the relationship between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the regime, few have examined developments in the political rapport between the two in the last decade. Important studies have touched on the relationship between the state and church during Nasser's regime, the Sadat years, and the early years of the Mubarak regime, up to the first half of the 1990s. However, there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between the Coptic church and the Egyptian state in the past ten years, a lacuna that this study addresses.

I think it is safe to say that the Arab Human Development Report 2005 (AHDR 2005) was the first report to be criticized and even attacked by its own authors. Some contested not being “fully” the “owner” of the report because they were forced to share it with some “disappointing” partners; some attacked it for not fully representing their fundamentalist secular beliefs. Others showed their discontent with its theoretical incoherence and its clear neoliberal approach. These differing stands reflect the spectrum of conflicting views and approaches in the Arab world about women's issues; they also reflect the lack of a spirit of teamwork.

The researchers and writers of the Arab Human Development Report 2005 (AHDR 2005) include activists, social critics, intellectuals, and feminists who aspire for izdihār (flourishing) in the Arab world “based on a peaceful process of negotiation for redistributing power and building good governance.” This passage suggests that the aims the AHDR 2005 shares with the previous three volumes are to encourage state apparatuses and officials to transform themselves by changing policies and surrendering some of the power and resources they have fortified vis-à-vis their citizenries. This article argues that rather than encouraging the rise of women or any group interested in political or social transformation, the AHDR 2005 works within a U.N. development framework that strengthens states and political elites in relation to their populations by constituting the former as the causes of underdevelopment and thus the primary agents for economic, social, and political improvement.

One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and state-building projects, continues to reproduce existing power structures and is a stratifying place, maintaining patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and segregation. This tension between the city as an enabling space versus the city as a reinforcer of socionational stratification is at the center of this article.

The ethical and political dilemmas posed by the construction and international circulation of discourses on women's rights in the Middle East are formidable. The plight of “Muslim women” has long occupied a special place in the Western political imagination, whether in colonial officials' dedication to saving them from barbaric practices or development projects devoted to empowering them. In the past fifteen years or so, through a series of international conferences and the efforts of feminist activists, women's rights have come to be framed successfully as universal human rights. Building on the U.N. conferences on women that started in 1975 and led to other initiatives, the appropriate arena of women's rights work has been redefined from the national to the international.

In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. Of most prominence, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) took up this charge in the form of an annual global human development report, releasing the first one in 1990. Perhaps no other human development reports have received as much attention in the past few years as have the Arab human development reports.