A historically unprecedented 142 women MPs were elected in the UK on May 6th. The election also saw the first Muslim women MPs; the first Black and first ‘out’ lesbian Conservative women MPs; and the first Green party MP was a woman too. But women continue to be under represented.
Whether the issue at hand is security, global governance, nuclear proliferation, peacebuilding or international law, feminist scholars have written extensively about (how) gender matters in global politics and, further, argued that paying analytical attention to gender allows us a range of insights that ‘gender-blind’ approaches do not access.
Thanks to decades of feminist activism within and outside international institutions, the issue of gender inequality is now firmly embedded within contemporary development policy and practice. In this essay I offer a brief overview of some of the debates and policies that inform feminist approaches to development policy and practice.
There is a growing body of literature on the impact of Fair Trade, and research suggests that Fair Trade improves the economic conditions of producers, communities receive important benefit from the social premium, and the partnership model allows for the development of sustainable cooperatives and craft enterprises. It makes a significant contribution at many different levels: the individual, the household, the organization, the wider business community, and to more equitable national development.
Contemporary social discourses are relegating the need to keep fighting for gender equality, mistakenly thinking that perhaps ‘addressing’ gender is the same as ‘normalising’ gender politics. It is against this landscape that Lady Catherine Ashton becomes the first High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
This round of Iran’s pre-election politics was marked by the full-force entry of the Iranian women’s movement onto the political scene with a well-thought-out strategy that has mobilized many change-seeking individuals and groups within civil society.
Images of women in chador and rusari (modest Islamic dress) beaten up by security forces in the streets of Tehran and other cities in Iran have dominated the news lately. Neda’s image and her brutal death in Tehran on Saturday June 20th in a protest demanding the annulment of the results of 10th presidential election in Iran has brought women’s active role in the post-election crisis into light.
The recent death of Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British servicewoman to die on a “deliberate” operation in Afghanistan, attracted much attention from the UK print media. The tributes reveal wider cultural discomfort towards the death of a young, bright servicewoman as a direct result of conflict. They also demonstrate the significance of gender to the legitimation of the ‘war on terror’.
It is my intention in this brief article to raise several issues regarding the lack of female elected representatives in the political institutions of Europe, with a particular emphasis on the UK.
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