Aili Mari Tripp's new monograph, Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women's Rights is a minutely crafted and thorough synthesis of quantitative data on women's rights in the Middle East produced over the past decade. The databases that inform Tripp's work include but are not limited to the OECD's Social Institutions Gender Index, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Pew Research Center, the Afrobarometer, and the Arab Barometer.

Through a series of causal and correlational analyses, characterized by a dexterous handling of dozens of variables, Tripp seeks to explain variances in states’ adoption of women's rights in the Mashriq (Egypt, Gulf countries, Lebanon and Jordan) and the Maghrib (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). Precisely, Tripp asks why autocratic states adopt women's rights in the first place and what the consequences might be for women and women's rights.

One of Tripp's highlights is her contestation of the dilution of two widely differing regions into the singular category of the Middle East. She identifies notable historical (the colonial power in question), sociopolitical (degree of Islamization and mobilization of women), and legislative factors in each in order to explain, in her words, the “convergence of constitutional and legislative reforms around women's rights in the Maghrib countries” and their “divergence” from the Mashriq (p. 64). Tripp is motivated by her commitment to elucidate possible oxymoronic beliefs on the incompatibility of authoritarian regimes’ investment in and adoption of women's rights, a task she successfully fulfills. This is an important exercise given the possible paradox that emerges from the association of modern and “good” global governance with progressive gender politics on the one hand, and the orientalist trope that reduces Middle Eastern nation-states to being particularly hostile to women, on the other hand. What's more, Saudi Arabia's recent U-turn on women-specific laws surely warrants Tripp's interrogations. In a European setting, Sara R. Farris (2017) has previously examined a somewhat similar paradox, to name the adoption of “women rights” narratives in right-wing nationalist circles.Footnote ¹ This paradox, following Farris, materializes from the precise characterization of Muslim men as dangerous to European society.

Tripp repeatedly critiques and successfully challenges widespread views underpinning Islam as the quintessential factor behind much of the region's dire gender equality record. She shows that countries from the Maghrib consistently outperform their Mashriq counterparts in the context of women's rights, due, in part, to the curtailed influence of Islamic jurisprudence on their constitution. We learn from Tripp that in the Maghrib, women's rights are used as a tempering tool, allowing the state to keep Islamist parties at bay whilst simultaneously serving as evidence of the latter's commitment to steer away from more extreme versions of political Islam. At the same time, Tripp cleverly contrasts Egypt with Algeria, Lebanon with Tunisia, and Jordan with Morocco in order to identify further important factors that limit states’ adoptions of women's rights, including Lebanon's fractured and confessional legal system, Egypt's systemic repression of civil society in general, notably the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jordan's overall lack of a developed party system. Such findings have been previously documented, although in closed contexts. However, Tripp's adoption of a zooming-out approach, allows her to map out a comprehensive, albeit preliminary, study of important political convergences (Maghrib) and divergences (Mashriq) in the context of women's rights.

The second important arena that Tripp addresses in her book relates to the nature of the legal system in place. Following Tripp, the adoption of a unified legal system in the Maghrib states, in contrast to the fragmented legislative corpuses observed in the Mashriq, notably Lebanon, and despite their imperfect implementation, play an important role in paving the way for future reforms and contribute to empowering women's political participation. Tripp recognizes both the symbolic aspect and limits of these reforms in an array of contexts, including constitutional, women-specific (rape, reproductive rights, and gender-based violence), family laws, and gender quotas. Her analysis encompasses no fewer than 17 variables, oftentimes in tension with one another, which only serves to reinforce her overall critical evaluation of the impact of legal reforms.

While Tripp's discussion of the tensions between Islamization and women's rights, on the one hand, and the impact of legal reforms, on the other, are convincingly laid out for the reader, the same cannot be said about the remaining factors she examines, possibly due to the limited and vague theoretical framework she posits. In contrast to her thorough handling of the databases she draws upon and her occasional attempts to complicate some of the concepts she puts forth, Tripp's sporadic theorizing fails to produce a complex and multifaceted analysis proper, which could be seen as the singular downside of her work.

For example, Tripp claims early in her book that her reading of women's rights recognizes their symbolic relevance to the actors and societies involved, a well-established and strongly reiterated point in the study of women's politics in the Middle East. Surprisingly, Tripp fails to include essential works by Deniz Kandiyoti and Nira Yuval-Davis in this regard. In addition, women's symbolic relevance is hardly revisited in the remainder of the book. With numbers, tables, and graphs dominating her discussion, Tripp's occasional inclusion of theoretical passages is confusing to the reader at best and incohesive at worst. It is notable on this point to reflect on Tripp's choice of the rather outdated theoretical framing of her work. Whereas the inclusion of Clifford Geertz’ work is telling of the lasting impact of his legacy, one can't help but notice Tripp's seeming unawareness of well-established anthropological interventions by women scholars from or working on the region. If anything, there is a noticeable gap between Tripp's solid handling of the databases she draws upon, and the incongruent conceptual framework that increasingly unfolds as an afterthought. This is particularly applicable to her examination of the Amazigh dimension.

An important aspect of Tripp's work is her timely examination of the growing influence of Amazigh culture and Sufi Islam on women's rights narratives in the Maghrib. We learn from Tripp that the perceived secularity of Amazigh women by the larger society and the empowering outcome of their unique customs provides an important “counterweight” to Islamism all the while establishing them as a threat to the ruling elite (p.86). Nevertheless, and despite conducting interviews in Tunisia (35 interviews), Morocco (80 interviews) and Algeria (40 interviews) with a variety of Islamist, feminist and legal women's organizations, NGO donors and party leaders, to name a few, Tripp limits her attention to Amazigh women's activism to its relation to the state and does not place it in conversation with other women activists groups. It is important to highlight this qualitative gap in light of the growing state-sanctioned backlash against a myriad of women activists in the Mashriq, and the urgency to build bridges across diverse though deeply disconnected women activists in both the Mashriq and the Maghrib. In other words, Tripp barely scratches the surface of what could have been a transnational and intersectional analysis proper.

In these ways, the book is best recommended as an up-to-date compilation of carefully selected quantitative reports on women's rights in the Middle East. However, for those more sophisticated readers who are well-trained in the literature on gender and women in the Middle East and in feminist theorizing from and on the region, Tripp's work, alas, is unlikely to stir their intellect in the same way that anthropological works do. Her early placed self-confessed surprise at the sight of large numbers of men in workshops and conferences dedicated to women's rights in North Africa, as opposed to the United States where such conferences are “primarily” the “domain of women” is telling of her somewhat dated and narrow framework (p. 3), characterized mainly by a binary understanding of gender (men and women) and an unproblematized male authority that recalls universalistic interpretations of a patriarchy in absolute.

Seen from a feminist lens, Tripp's reluctance to endorse her analysis with a qualitative layer that complicates (bottom-up analysis), rather than simplifies (top-down analysis), echoes western policy makers’ state-centric views. It also recalls classic Scandinavian state-feminism's overestimation of the reach and scope of the implementation of gender quotas, for instance. Such observations are not meant to invalidate Tripp's own thesis whereby she tells the reader early on that it is her intention to explore the mechanisms of the state first and foremost—a step she successfully fulfils. Those readers who champion the comparative method and prioritize policymaking and governance will find much verve and rigor in her work. The minute unpacking, juxtaposing, and contrasting of variables leaves little gap in her overall argument. On this point, Tripp's findings, given their overly quantitative nature, can and do provide “solid” evidence for those mainstream analysts who insist on measurable data in their examination of societal inequalities, to the irritation of anthropologists. Lastly, the book's serious attempt to distinguish between the Mashriq and the Maghrib will undoubtedly be of interest to novice readers or policy practitioners interested in or working on the Middle East.