Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW)––and more recently, the expansive term “gender-based violence” (GBV)––has come to prominence as a highly visible and powerful agenda across a range of local, national, and global domains. By embedding gender violence in a complex matrix of international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. Here, religion is regularly linked to gendered violence. We have seen this script play out countless times. Entire religious traditions are said to promote “cultures of violence.” Women in war are then abstracted out of their local contexts. The definition of VAW is narrowed to attacks on their bodily integrity (e.g. rape), and economic, political and structural forms of violence are excluded. Ending VAW becomes casus belli; local women’s calls for safe homes, safe public spaces, and stable governments are rendered unrecognizable as anti-violence interventions.
However, despite this powerful conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the crucial question of how religion intersects with VAW/GBV has hardly begun to be considered. Why and when is “religion” invoked in global responses to VAW/GBV? What roles are attributed to religion in these dynamic processes? How are new understandings of “religion” engineered through regimes of governance? What categories of the religious become seen as credible and acceptable, and are empowered as anti-GBV actors? What falls out? Who pays a price and who benefits from the ways religion is used to frame global understandings of VAW/GBV?
Given growing concerns about the conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the time is ripe for a project that mobilizes the collective experience, expertise, and creativity of an international group of critical feminist scholars, practitioners, activists, and journalists. “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” examined the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence. This three-year initiative was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and was co-directed by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Anthropology/Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality). Through a focus on the Middle East and South Asia, the project opened a critical global conversation with the conviction that more nuanced analyses lead both to more effective strategies for decreasing gender violence, and to more robust understandings of how certain framings of religion and violence can cloud the very diagnoses that are so essential to treating human suffering.
Project co-directors with Abu-Lughod included Professors Rema Hammami, Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University; Janet Jakobsen, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College; and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Director of the Gender Studies Program, Mada Al-Carmel, Arab Center for Applied Research.
The project is supported by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation from its initiative on Religion and International Affairs.
News
Our core mission at CSSD is to create the conditions for understanding and being able to challenge inequality and oppression in all its forms. We understand all forms of oppression are interconnected and so our commitment to solidarity with Palestinians is rooted in our commitment to imagining racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice globally.
Working group fellows have been busy writing critical work on the politics of gendered violence in fields ranging from Anthropology to Law and Public Policy.
The former Reframing Gendered Violence co-director’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? was referenced in a review of a new book on 21 Women Across the History of Islam.
CSSD working group RGFGV hosts twenty-five scholars, journalists, lawyers and activists for a two day intensive workshop of collaborative research sharing and brainstorming at Columbia University in New York City
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod delivers lecture for distinguished series on human rights at the University of Alberta
Maryam Saleh writes about the ways in which Syrian women in Turkey are redefining their independence.
Lila Abu-Lughod, co-director of CSSD working group Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence, shares her thoughts on two new books in the publication Public Books.
CSSD Project Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence announces its second Media Fellowship Competition.
Fellows
Fellow, Strategic Studies, University of Jordan
Sara Ababneh is Assistant Professor at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies. She is the Refugee Studies Diploma and CSS Internship program coordinator, and she wrote her dissertation on female Islamists in Hamas in occupied Palestine and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan.
Fellow, Gender Studies, SOAS University of London
Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies (CGS), SOAS University of London. She is currently chair of CGS and head of the Doctoral School at SOAS. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism; transnational migration and diaspora moblization; war, conflict and peace; as well as art & cultural studies; mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement.
Fellow, Language and Communication, American University of Madaba
Wafa Al-Khadra is a university professor and experienced university administrator, currently serving as Dean of Faculty of Languages and Communication at the American University of Madaba.
Fellow, Economics, Mount Holyoke College
Nissreen Haram holds a B.A. in economics from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and an M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University in Montreal. She has had a diverse career as a Trade Policy Advisor, Law Firm Director, Children’s Museum Director, and Artisan Cheese maker. She has also been member of the Yale Law School Middle East Seminar, and its organizing committee for more than 15 years. She is actively interested in Islamic legal and intellectual history, and contemporary approaches to religious reform.
Fellow, Sociology, Rutgers
Zahra Ali is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers, Newark. Her research explores women and gender issues in relation to Islam and the Middle East, as well as contemporary Muslim communities and Islamisms.
Fellow, Human Rights, International Youth Health and Rights at Advocates for Youth
Urooj Arshad is the Associate director of International Youth Health and Rights at Advocates for Youth. She manages a project of the International Division that builds the capacity of youth-driven organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to empower young people.
Fellow, Executive Director, Justice Center for Legal Aid in Jordan
Hadeel Aziz is the Executive Director of the Justice Center for Legal Aid in Jordan. In 2008, Hadeel pioneered free legal assistance in Jordan when she left a multi-million dollar USAID project on the rule of law to co-found the Justice Center for Legal Aid (JCLA).
Fellow, Inclusive Policies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences Centre
Qudsiya Contractor is an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies, School of Research Methodology.
Professor, Department of Religion, Columbia University
Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey, and India, and among Muslims in Europe and the United States. Her research has focused on debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world, the place of Muslims within the German national imaginary, and sexualities, gender, and the body in South Asia.
Fellow, International Policy, Stanford University
Amal Ghandour is Strategy Adviser to Ruwwad al Tanmeyah, a regional community development initiative, and Special Adviser to Columbia University Global Centers, Middle East. Ghandour’s career spans two decades in the fields of research and communication. An author (About This Man Called Ali) and a blogger (Thinking Fits), Ghandour holds an MS in International Policy from Stanford University and a BSFS from Georgetown University.
Fellow, Gender Social Fund, Jordon
Hala Ghosheh is a gender expert and development consultant, who was the Director of the five year Gender Social Fund in Jordan. She specializes in sustainable development work with focus on women and youth. Her experience includes working on policy, institutional and local community levels in several countries in the region. She has worked on program management, design, development and monitoring and evaluation, organizational gender reviews and conducting qualitative research to assess the status of women and youth in different contexts.
Fellow, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies, Yale University
Inderpal Grewal is Professor and Chair in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel(Duke University Press, 1996), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America (Duke University Press, 2017).
Fellow, Sociology, University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas is Professor, University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Education Sciences Department.
She was formerly Associate Professor at the University of Paris Nord/13 and Co-Director of EXPERICE Research Center.
Guénif-Souilamas holds a Phd in Sociology from l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a HDR of Sciences Po Paris.
Fellow, South Asian Studies, Columbia University
Joymala Hajra divides her time between the Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Project, where she is the Program Coordinator and The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, where she is the Manager of Design and Communication.
Fellow, Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke 1999). With Wendy Brown, she coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002), and with Andrew Parker she coedited After Sex?
Fellow, Anthropology, Birzeit University
Rema Hammami is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University where she founded the graduate program in Gender and Development in 1998, the first graduate program in gender studies in the region.
Chair and Assistant Professor, Rhetoric Studies, Whitman College
Heather Ashley Hayes is Chair and Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. She works across the intersections of rhetorical materialism, race, violence, the global war on terror, and argument studies. Since 2013, she has delivered a number of talks and presentations including work on the revolutionary events in Egypt's Tahrir Square that ousted Hosni Mubarak in January of 2011.
Professor, Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor and Chair of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development.
Doctoral Student, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Shenila Khoji-Moolji received her doctorate in Education and additional certification in Feminist Theory from Columbia University in 2016. Her research interests include examining discourses on gender and education, and their entanglement with practices of power. Dr. Khoja-Moolji’s work problematizes the centering of girls’ education and empowerment as a solution to societal problems, especially in relation to Muslim-majority nations.
PhD Student, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Liza McIntosh is a PhD student in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. She is broadly interested in the culture and texts of the Early Modern period, with a focus on questions of gender, sexuality, and nature. She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University in English and Art History.
Graduate Student, Religion, Columbia University
Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. She comes to her doctoral studies through nearly twenty years of grassroots activism to end state violence and advance community healing. Her research examines the co-constitution of race and religion, of gender and governance, in the American and Global South today by ethnographically centering women’s geographies and archives of struggle.
Fellow, Anthropology, New York University
Sally Engle Merry's recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge, 2007). Her most recent book, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance. She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, and theJ.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010.
Fellow, Legal Scholar, NYU Gallatin School of Law
Vasuki Nesiah is a legal scholar with a focus on public international law at NYU Gallatin School of Law. Her main areas of research include the law and politics of international human rights and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transitional justice.
Fellow, Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.
Rupal Oza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work focuses on political economic transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between development and security. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She has several articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has written on special economic zones, the discourse of security, and Hindutva politics India. Her current project examines the relationship between sexual assault, caste, and land in Haryana, India. She is also working on a collaborative project that examines foreclosures and gentrification in New York City.
Associate Professor, Department of Islamic Studies, Columbia University
Kathryn Spellman Poots is a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University and Academic Program Director for the MA in Islamic Studies. She is also Associate Professor at the Aga Khan
Fellow, International Relations, Northwestern University
Maryam Saleh is an editor and reporter at The Intercept’s Washington, D.C. bureau, where she covers immigration, politics, and foreign policy. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Fellow, Law, Sindh Muslim Law College
Shagufta Shah is an anti-violence violence advocate and counselor at the Arab-American Family Support Center (AAFSC) of New York. She joined AAFSC in 2013 as a Disaster Case Manager then promoted as Program Manager for the same project, when AAFSC operated a program to help families recover in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Fellow, Public Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a longtime anti-violence, native Palestinian feminist activist and scholar. She is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Fellow, Anthropology, BRAC University
Dina M. Siddiqi divides her time between New York and Dhaka, where she is Professor of Anthropology, BRAC University. Her publications, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, cover a broad spectrum: the global garment industry; gender justice and non-state dispute resolution systems, and the intersections of Islam, nationalism and feminist cultural politics. She is currently working on a book entitled Elusive Solidarities: “Muslim” Women and Transnational Feminism at Work. Siddiqi is on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series, a member of the South Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), and on the Gender Advisory Council of the Lahore School of Management Sciences (LUMS). She is also part of the Advisory Council of the South Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers (SANGAT). She has extensive research experience with Bangladeshi human rights organizations, including Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) and Bangladesh Legal and Services Trust (BLAST).
Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies
Mayssoun Sukarieh is co-convener of the MA degree in Political Economy of the Middle East. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA and BA from the American University of Beirut. Since then she has lectured in anthropology and development studies in universities around the Arab region (American University of Beirut; American University of Cairo) and the United States (Columbia & Brown Universities). Her research interests focus on youth, education, development and social movements in the Arab region, with a particular interest in studying the political, economic, cultural and social structures and processes that tie the region in complex and contradictory ways to the larger global political economy. Her first book, Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy (co-authored with Stuart Tannock) was published earlier this year by Routledge's Critical Youth Studies series. In 2015, she was also appointed as a Fellow of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
Fellow, Anthropology, BRAC University
Dina M. Siddiqi divides her time between New York and Dhaka, where she is Professor of Anthropology, BRAC University. Her publications, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, cover a broad spectrum: the global garment industry; gender justice and non-state dispute resolution systems, and the intersections of Islam, nationalism and feminist cultural politics. She is currently working on a book entitled Elusive Solidarities: “Muslim” Women and Transnational Feminism at Work. Siddiqi is on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series, a member of the South Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), and on the Gender Advisory Council of the Lahore School of Management Sciences (LUMS). She is also part of the Advisory Council of the South Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers (SANGAT). She has extensive research experience with Bangladeshi human rights organizations, including Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) and Bangladesh Legal and Services Trust (BLAST).
Fellow, Sociocultural Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Shahla Talebi is a scholar of religions, 2006 Newcombe Fellow, and Associate Professor at Arizona State University. A native of Iran, she lived in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.
Fellow, Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College
Aditi Surie Von Czechowski is Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. She recently received her PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the intersection of humanitarianism and human rights and theories of the human.
Fellow, Social Studies, The Hague
Dubravka Žarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Her fields of expertise are gender and its intersections with sexuality, ethnicity and religion; violent conflict, war and militarism, including gender based sexual violence and communalism, and visual and textual representations of war, violence, and soldiering. She also works on masculinity and sexual violence in wars against men. Among her publications are: Conflict, Peace, Security and Development: Theories and Methodologies (with Helen Hintjens, 2015); Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (with Marlies Glasius, 2014); Gender, Violent Conflict, and Development (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007); and The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, (with Cynthia Cockburn, 2002). One of her most recent articles is on faith and feminism.
Media Fellows
Fellow, Political Science, The American University, Cairo
Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, researcher and cultural producer. She lives in New York and Cairo. Yasmin is a Middle East and North Africa research associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Previously, she worked in journalism and human rights in Egypt, focusing on the struggle against sexual harassment. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from The American University of Cairo and a graduate diploma in Law from the City University in London.
Fellow, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence, Columbia University
Samira Shackle is a freelance British journalist, writing mainly on politics, terrorism, and gender. Samira writes for The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Times, Vice, and many others. She has won multiple awards for her reporting and often sits on panels, generally discussing issues relating to international development, Islam, feminism, and terrorism. Samira has a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford.
Media Fellow, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence
Nafeesa Syeed is an award-winning multimedia journalist with a decade of full-time experience on four continents in spot news and enterprise reporting, editing and producing. She works as a National Security Reporter for Bloomberg News based in Washington, D.C. Nafeesa has held positions at the Dubai Bureau and Al Jazeera America. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a B.A. in Arabic and Government from Georgetown University.
Fellow, Writer, Columbia University
Rafia Zakaria is an author, editor and attorney. She has been a weekly columnist for DAWN, Pakistan’s largest and oldest English language daily since 2009. Her column is syndicated in newspapers all over the world through the Inter Press Service and is regularly republished in the Deccan Chronicle, The Wire India, Kathmandu Post, Sri Lanka Guardian, Korea Herald, New Straits Times and The Internazionale among others. She writes the “Alienated” column for The Baffler and has previously been a regular columnist for Al Jazeera America. She also writes regularly for Guardian Books and is a CNN Opinion contributor. Her recent New York Times Op-Ed “The Myth of Women’s Empowerment” was shared over 30K times on Facebook.
Past Events
This seminar is based on the findings of a three-year collaborative research project between feminist scholars of the Middle East and South Asia that explored these questions across a range of intersecting local, national, and global contexts, in the process uncovering the ways in which religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run deeply through the international governance structures of GBVAW, even when insistently disavowed.
Lila Abu-Lughod discusses how agendas to combat violence against women and gender-based violence have been taken up as tools of state sovereignty and global security.
Please join us in celebrating the recent publication of Gender, Governance and Islam, with an introduction by Lila Abu-Lughod.
A panel with Sherene Razack (Department of Gender Studies, UCLA), Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Law School, Hebrew University; International Visitor, Columbia Law School), and Miriam Ticktin (Department of Anthropology, New School University), moderated by Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University)
Thursday, November 3, 2016, 4:15 p.m.
203 Butler Library
“Child Marriage in the Feminist Imagination”
Dina Siddiqi, Professor of Anthropology at BRAC University, Dhaka
“Race, Religion, and Masculinity: Europe’s Obsessions”
October 13, 4:15 p.m., 203 Butler Library
"Feminist Politics, War Rapes, and Global Governance"
Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague