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OVERVIEW: ENGAGING THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2005 ON WOMEN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2009

Extract

The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (AHDR 2005), published in Arabic with English and French translations, was launched at the end of 2006. With a title carefully crafted to avoid Western development buzzwords like “empowerment” and to signal the inclusion of all women living in the region, it is the third in a series of detailed studies meant to unpack the themes of the original overview report that garnered both acclaim and criticism when it was published in 2002. The other two topical reports examine what were billed as “deficits” in knowledge and in freedom. This one tackles what the original report framed as the third major obstacle to the flourishing of the Arab world: the deficit in gender equality.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

NOTES

1 For a wide range of references to both Arabic- and English-language assessments of the reports, see, in addition to the articles in this issue, Hoda Elsadda's article on the AHDR 2005 in the conference proceeding she has edited, Intaj al-Maʿrifa ʿan al-ʿAlam al-ʿArabi (Cairo: Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt, in press).

2 Good critiques of the reports can be found in Arab Studies Quarterly 26 (2004).

3 Elsadda, Intaj al-Maʿrifa ʿan al-ʿAlam al-ʿArabi.

4 Although much of this academic work has been published in English, it has been increasingly in dialogue with critical feminist scholarship developing in the Arab world and in Arabic. As Marilyn Booth has noted, by the 1990s the production of knowledge about women had moved back to an Arab world that offered the “first historical analyses of women's status published just before the turn of the twentieth century in Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey, as interventions in shaping a nationalist narrative.” Booth, Marilyn, “New Directions in Middle East Women's and Gender History,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4 (2003): 128–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.