The most recent articles
The most recent articles
IRAQI WOMEN NETWORK CONFERENCE
‛‛Commemorating Pioneer Women and present challenges for the Iraqi"
Monday 7 January 2008
by Iraqi Women Network
Iraqi women network held a conference in 17th Nov. 2007 in Baghdad, under the slogan "Pioneering and continuity for Iraqi women March". 200 participants gathered in the activity, including ministers, members and advisors from the House of Representatives, and Kurdistan Parliament, ministries (...) > continue
IRAN / INTERVIEW
Shirin Ebadi: "Ronak and Hana’s only crime is to seek equality"
Monday 7 January 2008
by One Million Signature Campaign, Shirin Ebadi
Over two months have passed since the arrests of Ronak Saffarzadeh and Hana Abdi, two members of the Azar Mehr Kurdish Women’s Society (a women’s NGO in Kurdistan, Iran). They were arrested shortly after they collected signatures for the One Million Signatures Campaign at an event in (...) > continue
GERMANY / DOMESTIC LABOR / MIGRANTS
How social movements analyse - and mobilise on - female migrant domestic labour (Germany)
Sunday 6 January 2008
by RLS - Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
The ethnification of paid domestic work challenges leftist feminist theory and practice and requires new alliances by feminists with other social movements. In Germany, movements like Kanak Attak or Respekt Campaign, feminist marxists of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, have produced together with others, very interesting analyses, proposals and campaigns. Here to be read is a good overview of this work by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. > continue
Feminist Story, From a Reading Group to the Campaign for One Million Signatures : Portrait of Jelve Javaheri (Iran)
Thursday 3 January 2008
by One Million Signature Campaign, Nahid Keshavarz
I’ve known Jelve since the early 2000’s. Along with her friends, she attended the Women’s Cultural Center’s speak-out event, "Resisting Violence Against Women," in Laleh Park on International Women’s Day in 2003. She and her friends had been working on violence against women issues and were eager to (...) > continue
Pakistan / Feminist platform
Requiem for Benazir Bhutto
Monday 31 December 2007
by Women’s Action Forum (Pakistan)
Women’s Action Forum grieves.
It grieves with Bakhtawar, Bilawal and Asifa,
It grieves with Nusrat and Sanam Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari,
It grieves with all members of the Bhutto family,
It grieves with the PPP and all PPP workers and supporters,
It grieves with the poor and the oppressed, (...) > continue
IRAQ / TESTIMONY
Eid al Adha, the festival of Sacrifice... 2008 NEW YEAR WISHES FROM BAGHDAD
Sunday 30 December 2007
by Leila Fadel
The Webblog Baghdad Observer is written by Leila Fadel, the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. She has covered the war in Iraq for Knight Ridder and now McClatchy on and off since June 2005, as well as the 34-day war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006. The McClatchy Company, based in Sacramento, Calif., purchased Knight Ridder in 2006 and runs 31 U.S. newspapers. The company was one of the few whose coverage of the run-up to the 2003 invasion questioned the Bush administration’s evidence for war. > continue
Palestine / Gendered analysis
House Demolition: A Palestinian Feminist Perspective
Sunday 30 December 2007
by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Ph.D
This essay originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Womenspecifically looks at Israeli military attacks on Palestinian house demolitions, and seeks to sketch the effects of such demolitions on Palestinian women. By carefully listening to the words of women, and looking at house demolitions with more than a jaded eye, it hopes to show how the destruction of the house, is also significantly a destruction of “home” for Palestinians, the demolition of the house is not an isolated political, legal, social or psychological issue. Thus it focuses on that space of confluence of the private sphere and the larger political and politicized and public space beyond. > continue
Trade-Unionist Hanan Gusab Isamail Siaqal : “Women workers are demanding more respect”(Jordan)
Friday 21 December 2007
by ITUC CSI
Excessive working hours, low wages, transport problems and maternity rights are all mentioned by Hanan Gusab Isamail Siaqal, a member of the women’s committee of the trade union GFJTU in Irbid (Jordan). She explains the problems faced by Jordanian and immigrant women workers in the textile factories of the “QIZs” ( “qualified industrialized zones”). The International Trade-Union Confederation (ITUC) has just published new documents about its active work on migrants’ working conditions around the world, one of them specifically about Middle East. We publish here some excerpts from them. > continue
The "Women’s Pacific Road" against civil war : March for the "Violence against Women" International Day (Colombia)
Sunday 16 December 2007
by Topics & Roses
Despite high media coverage, Ingrid Betancourt is not the only victim of civil war in Colombia. War disappearances concern NGO leaders, journalists, trade-unionists, law officers, and active citizens that are involved in their country’s democracy. Paramilitaries are responsible for more than ten years of massacres. Despite their official demobilisation, they go on with killing and terrorizing. Some spectacular cases showing links between army, political personalities and paramilitaries are now being trialed. The guerilla is also responsible for war crimes, but in comparatively less big dimensions. In this violent context, rape has become a war weapon, denounced by La Ruta Pacifica, "The Women’s Pacific Road", which is a women’s movement that constitutes a significant part of Colombian civil society’s increasing opposition to the bloody conflict between State and armed fractions. La Ruta Pacifica does a conscientisation and lobbying work on war’s real damages, especially those concerning women, and on the importance of women’s participation to peace negociations in application of UN Security Council resolution 13-45. It organises also marches to conflict areas in order to support women trapped there by violence and to alert on their situation, at last to say NO to conflict. > continue
Why a feminist perspective is urgently needed in ecological issues and related social struggles of the time.
Sunday 9 December 2007
by DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), Yvonne Underhill-Sem
Place matters because without a recognition of and attachment to places, we cannot defend the environment, we cannot feel a struggle, we cannot fight for anything... But then how to fight for environment issues in a gendered perspective? Within the different existing feminist-environmentalist strands of thought and action, the specific notion of women’s human rights to a safe and clean environment rather than their generic human rights, rarely emerges. Yet without an explicit notion of women’s human rights within these debates, connections with other rights-based women’s movements are difficult to make... Yet feminist concerns in mainstream environmental movements are rarely given prominence, which reinforces enduring notions that essentialise women as silent victims of dominant capitalist practices. This is a remarkable analysis and useful presentation made by a female activist leader from the Pacific region involved in sustainable devolpment fights, for Commission on Environment, Ecology and Sustainable Development (ICAE 7th World Assembly), in Nairobi, Kenya, on January 17-19, 2007 (original title "Environmental Education and Gender Justice"). > continue
