Since 2017, as the Me Too movement has swept through both cyber and physical space, it has exposed multifaceted manifestations of global patriarchy, illuminating the challenges women face daily while ultimately spurring social and structural change. Women and Social Change in North Africa: What Counts as Revolutionary? could not have come at a better time. Combining the work of nineteen scholars, NGO and civil society workers, as well as a human rights lawyer, this volume provides valuable insight into the legal, political, economic, and social challenges faced by women in North Africa. Far from exoticizing an ostensible ‘oriental patriarchy’, the authors bring nuance and intersectionality to the conversation on women's rights in North Africa and elsewhere. Additionally, by focusing on parties within the region who are pushing for reform, the contributors problematize what constitutes real social change by situating their analysis around the central question: ‘What is social change and how does it happen – or not?’

The text hosts contributions on diverse topics from the region. To highlight but a few: the changing organization of NGOs and their interactions with state and regional institutions; the challenges faced by domestic violence shelters in Morocco and the extent to which they operate as ‘transformative institutions’; women's access to land ownership in Morocco and its relation to the commodification of collective lands; the gendered access to microcredit in Morocco, its antecedents, and consequences; Moroccan feminist Islamic liberation theology and its relation to state discourses on feminism and Islam; as well as how the Egyptian revolution opened space for more women's participation within Salafi political parties and beyond. On these topics and others, the book's historical and contemporary foci provide insightful critiques bracketed with useful, suggested policy changes.

Throughout the text the authors rightly stress the importance of ethnography and research in situ. Interrogating the efficacy of women's rights efforts on the ground against NGOs’ claims of success (variously formulated to attract patronage in a climate of inconsistent financial and political support) is just one of the ways that the text illustrates this point. By focusing their efforts on specific issues in local contexts, the contributors also demonstrate how global trends such as privatization and land consolidation have exacerbated inequalities in the global south (Berriane, 70). Additionally, the book raises the more general question of the politicization of women's rights issues by various bodies in the post-9/11 world, where women, sex, and gender rights discourses have all been coopted into the language of hawkish militants, security personnel, and the repressive apparatuses of western-friendly governments. Concurrently, the text goes beyond the utilization of women's rights discourses as ideological cover for autocratic practice (via ‘state feminism’), or the romanticization of the Middle East and North Africa as the apparent key battleground in the fight for women's rights, offering instead, in-depth case studies on specific issues on North Africa.

The volume is heavily focused on Morocco, with other contributions on Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Dutch Moroccans in the Netherlands. The text, unfortunately, is completely silent on Libya and women's rights therein. While one could excuse this exclusion considering the tremendous challenges to conducting research in/on the country, the lacuna is not seriously acknowledged by the editors. Similarly, research conducted within the context of the nation-state makes an in-depth transnational analysis extremely difficult to undertake for innumerable reasons. As such, there is no chapter on transnational networks of activists – although Dörthe Engelcke does acknowledge the importance of these questions (309) – highlighting the need for, and the potential directions of, further research.

As a collected volume, the book is in no way a coherent assertion of a single view or proposed policy change. The many authors share much more on these questions than they differ, but the contributors commit to undertaking an analysis of divergent issues, in countries that are themselves diverse, and addressing them through varying frameworks. Thus, the differing backgrounds and approaches that the contributors bring to these issues yields a heterogenous collection with relevance to multiple audiences. In covering such diverse topics, the contributors offer valuable insight on (and from within) social movements in the region, law and social change, development economics, subalternity, culture and healthcare, philosophies of action, among other topics. As such, the volume makes substantial contributions to the fields of Middle East Studies, Gender Studies, Development Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, History, and Political Science. Whether advanced by the state, pushed by society at large, or in the work of individual advocates, practitioners and concerned citizens, women's rights efforts in North Africa remain a dynamic, complex terrain that merits our close attention. This volume therefore constitutes a welcome and necessary addition to the corpus.