One cannot paint a single homogenous image of Arab women’s activism, view such activism, (once it captures media attention) as a novelty, or center its analysis on assumptions about Arab or Islamic culture. Instead, to better understand women’s activism in the region, one must be “attentive to the geopolitical context in which it emerged” (p. 67). This is the premise of Nicola Pratt’s recent book, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Pratt contends that a proper understanding should move beyond cultural determinism and orientalist stereotypes and begin with postcolonial nation building and postcolonial state projects of national sovereignty and modernization (p. 21) and their gendered underpinnings. It is therefore important to start thinking of women’s agency within the field of international relations beyond the binary of “resistance and opposition to dominant power of different scales and the forms of violence with which it is associated” (p. 23) and examine how “gender is entangled in the construction and normalization of different geopolitical scales and wider relations of power” (p. 23).

For Pratt, establishing sovereignty, modernization, and nation building all represent embodied forms of geopolitics. Women embody them in their performance of and resistance to notions of female respectability while performing public roles (chapter 1), in their expressed agency of their everyday activism (chapters 2–5), and in the way they negotiate their fear of war and its implications (chapter 7). These three concepts—respectability, agency, and fear—constitute to Pratt the sites where women embody the geopolitical powers at work in the region and help shape them. Her approach challenges heteronormative theories of international relations and offers instead a postcolonial and feminist framework that privileges the personal and lived experiences over archival materials. Embodying Geopolitics constructs a history of women’s activism narrated as it was experienced by “more than 100 women activists” interviewed in 2012/2013, the time when the Arab uprisings were at their tensest. It also narrates a history of the region with these experiences at its core. In this history, Pratt challenges the binary view of separate private/public spheres as natural and ahistorical, and she presents the embodiment of geopolitics in the context of the Arab region as manifested in the constitutional definitions of a post-independence nation, legal regulation of citizens’ bodies and sexualities, and conceptions of national security and determination of borders.

This feminist and postcolonial framework proposed by Pratt has many merits: it offers important insights into the scene of women’s activism at a significant juncture of the region’s history (the popular uprising of 2010 onward); it shifts the analysis from focusing solely on culture and religion in understanding women and gender issues in the Arab World; and it widens the scope of variables under consideration, inviting the reader to consider the complex web of intersecting legacies and effects of colonialism and neocolonialism (neoliberalism). Yet, although Pratt’s feminist and postcolonial approach has all these merits, it also suffers from blind spots.

First, her analysis sets colonialism as the necessary historical condition for women’s activism in the region. The encounter with the West becomes central to the narrative of women’s activism she constructs: “while women (mainly of the peasant and working class) have always participated in the economic, social and cultural life of former Ottoman societies…the substantial public visibility of women—especially those of upper classes—was a modern phenomenon linked to socioeconomic and political changes arriving with the European penetration and later colonial rule” (pp. 66–67).

This observation might be true, as she states, of upper-class women’s activism in the first and second half of the twentieth century, but it is starkly dismissive of Bedouin, peasant, and working-class women’s activism that preceded the formation of middle-class women and the rise of their feminist consciousness. For example, prior to the establishment of modern Jordan and during the Ottoman rule, women from Karak, a southern province of today’s Jordan, played significant political roles in the series of uprisings leading to the Arab Revolt in 1916. Their roles were not only or simply “cultural, social, or economic,” as Pratt describes. They were extraordinarily political. To tell the history of a nation beginning with colonialism not only centers its history on the encounter with the West, but also continues to treat history as a series of neat sequential events and undermines important and complex histories of women’s activism. In Jordan today, there is an effort at rewriting the history of the Great Arab Revolt, which is central to Jordan’s national narrative. Such an effort begins with women’s active political role, which began long before 1916 when the Revolt expanded and became supported by the British.

There is no doubt that Western hegemony, colonial expansion, and neocolonialism have their formative marks on the region’s current history and women’s status. And although it is essential that one challenge the false premise of colonialism as a civilizing mission and neocolonialism as progress, one must be cautious not to be reductionist of history. Pratt’s analysis therefore invites an important question of how one can write a history of the region, and women’s agency within it, by decentering the West while not ignoring its negative formative effect. The answer could be in following a decolonial feminist approach that constructs a genealogical rather than a generic history of activism. Pratt cites Maria Lugones (p. 29) in this vein but still tells a linear history throughout her book. Pratt’s history is indeed critical, but it still follows a chronological sequence of events centering the encounter with the West as the sole formative event in the region.

The linear history constructed by Pratt becomes at times less critical, especially if one considers her analysis of women’s activism in Egypt. Although she cites Leila Ahmad, the author of Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots to Modern Debates (p. 73), she overlooks Ahmad’s central argument. Pratt misses the opportunity, discussed at length by Ahmad, to examine how Qasim Amin’s work was directly entangled in colonialism. Although Pratt celebrates Amin’s Liberation of Women and The New Woman as anticolonial and feminist, Ahmad regards Amin as a hired pen commissioned by the British. Amin, in fact, regarded Muslim culture as backward and believed that progress required assimilation into Western ways of life that cannot be culturally Arab or Muslim.

Moreover, one would imagine with a premise such as the one presented in Pratt’s introduction that subtle distinctions in the manifestations of women’s activism in the three cases she examines would be a matter of greater attention. However, Egypt occupies most of Pratt’s analysis. In it, the historical context in which she situates women’s lived experiences is explained at a length not granted to her other two cases: Jordan and Lebanon. At times, the history of women’s activism in Egypt is treated as representative of the history of the entire region. To debate the role of Islam in public life is uniquely an Egyptian matter. In Jordan, the early shy reference to polygamy in the 1950s and the recent demands to reform the personal status code never presented a challenge to religion or its interpretation. One would have expected that Pratt’s discussion of respectability would reveal or help to understand such national distinctions.

Pratt would perhaps respond to this critique by arguing that her analysis was never intended to be strictly “factual” or to tell a complete story. Her intention was to narrate a history as a lived experience by women who answered her question, Why are you active in public life? (p. 20). Such history has, of course, great value, but Pratt’s book still supplements women’s experiences with historical facts she borrows from the wide base of literature she uses throughout the book as context.

Against this backdrop, chapter 5—on political economy and the neoliberal turn in light of Pratt’s understanding of socioeconomic class—is worthy of further attention. She tells the story of the NGOization of women’s activism in the Arab world in the 1980s/1990s as (1) an action to solidify women’s activism and turn it into a force to be reckoned with and (2) a necessary reaction to the constraints resulting from the state’s deployment of survival tactics and the constant reconfiguring of laws governing public assembly and free speech. Pratt explains how the NGOization of women’s activism has served as “genderwashing” (p. 254) of the neoliberal project adopted by many Arab states. Women’s NGOs as well as other NGOs in the region helped depoliticize key socioeconomic inequalities such as poverty and unemployment by replacing the state and shifting the burden of poverty alleviation from the state to civil society. Despite the importance of this point, it also misses the critical fact that civil society has become the site where neoliberal values have also become embodied by women’s activists. The current calls for women’s entrepreneurship, agility, women’s leadership, and ownership of capital are central to women’s activism in the region, and several women’s NGOs present them under notions of women’s social and economic rights. Such values are not simply embodied because of power dynamics but because of internal class hierarchies that Pratt’s text mentions but fails to further explain, especially in regard to their impact on the nature and scope of women’s activism in the region. Entanglement in neoliberalism is present in the way newer forms of Arab women’s activism focus on individual salvation and the autonomy of women’s bodies, which are demanded only to the extent that women become the sole controller over the commodification and exchange process of them. Class cannot be treated peripherally or as function of personal narrative. Class is a material condition and should occupy a central place in any analysis of women’s activism in the region and worldwide.

That said, the highest appreciation one can grant scholarship is to critique it. Pratt’s analysis offers real depth, and her interviews are rich and informative. Her book raises several questions about the merits of a postcolonial feminist framework and the methodology of lived histories. It is because such questions are triggered in the reader’s mind that Pratt’s book is worthy of careful attention. This book is a timely, nuanced, and much-needed critical addition to the literature on women’s activism in the Arab world and the wider field of international relations.