The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has long had a reputation of being particularly bad when it comes to women’s rights. Of course, such a broad generalization is inevitably reductive. What do we mean by women’s rights? How do we measure women’s equality? And what about significant internal variation on different measures of women’s rights within the region? Aili Mari Tripp tackles these and other questions in unpacking the subject of women’s rights in the Arab world. She starts from an important puzzle: Why have the countries of the Maghreb—Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria—undertaken extensive constitutional and legislative reforms in support of women’s rights in a way that has substantially set them apart from the rest of the Arab world? Today, the Maghreb countries boast the most progressive constitutions and legislation in the region, with significant provisions on gender equality, more equitable family law, guaranteed parity in political representation, protection of reproductive rights, and legislation on violence against women. Tripp aims to exploit this difference between the Maghreb and the other countries of the MENA to answer a theoretically important question: Why do some authoritarian regimes adopt women’s rights, even in the absence of a popular demand for such reforms, while others do not?

Tracing the evolution of constitutional and legislative reform in each of the Maghreb countries, Tripp offers a nuanced answer that emphasizes the strategic choices of key political actors in particular historical junctures. The three major players in this strategic interaction are the authoritarian regime, the Islamist opposition, and women’s rights organizations. The most influential of these is the regime, which monopolizes much of the power to steer constitutional and legislative changes. In each of the three countries, although in different historical moments and to different degrees, authoritarian regimes have been challenged by the growing popularity and assertiveness of Islamist opposition. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, women’s movements, which were not as strong on the grassroots level as the Islamists but nevertheless knew how to make demands, mobilize resources, and collaborate with other transnational and regional Maghrebi women’s groups, were tireless in their advocacy with the regime to advance women’s rights. The strategic interaction between these three actors resulted in unprecedented advancements in women’s rights in the Maghreb.

The convergence on women’s rights in the Maghreb was not inevitable; at independence, each country started off from a very different point. What the three did have in common were a legacy of French colonialism and a unified legal system, which was not bifurcated between civil courts and religious, or sharia, courts. But politically the countries could not have been more different. Morocco was a monarchy in which the king drew on religious and cultural traditions to legitimate his rule and accommodated at various points some limited degree of political pluralism. Tunisia was ruled by a secular regime that used women’s rights as a cornerstone of its modernizing image, while being significantly more repressive of political pluralism than Morocco. Finally, Algeria had a secular authoritarian regime that made significant concessions to Islamists in the area of women’s rights since the 1960s, but which later, in the 1990s, waged a bloody civil war against them, in the process engaging in brutal repression of all opposition, not just of Islamists.

Where the story of convergence begins, according to Tripp, is in the early 2000s. In all three countries, the regimes came to see women’s rights as an increasingly useful tool that could help on two fronts. Internationally, promoting women’s rights could improve the regime’s image abroad. Domestically, adopting women’s rights would marginalize Islamist extremists. Seizing on this new regime calculus, women’s organizations in the Maghreb exploited various moments of crisis—from Islamist terrorist attacks to the Arab uprisings—to push for more progressive reform. Being more organized and more linked across the Maghreb in comparison to their counterparts in the rest of the Arab world, they were in a better position to take advantage of political opportunities.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this story is the reaction of the Islamist opposition. At least in Morocco and Tunisia, there has been a profound shift within the leading Islamist parties on the matter of women’s rights. As political liberalization allowed them to move from the opposition to forming or being a part of the government, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco and Enahda in Tunisia went from being among the main voices of opposition to reforms that enhanced women’s equality to accepting them or, in some cases, presenting themselves as their champions. In Algeria, Islamists have been so marginalized politically that they have had little say on recent reform, but there is some indication that Algerian moderate Islamists are taking their cues from the experience of their counterparts in the two other countries and changing their positions on women’s rights.

Tripp’s study has many strengths that are too numerous to fully list here. Three highlights provide a sample of some of the many contributions the book offers, which make it required reading for anyone concerned with women’s rights in the MENA region specifically and, more broadly, in the context of authoritarianism. First, the book makes a very convincing case for rejecting go-to explanations for the relative progressiveness in the Maghreb in comparison to the rest of the Arab world. For many observers, cultural differences would be a default assumption. The Maghreb is sometimes romantically imagined as more secular, as more pluralist, or as having a softer or more tolerant Muslim culture. The French secular legacy, Sufism and “moderate” religiosity, and the presence of a significant, non-Arab Amazigh ethnic minority could all lead one to believe that the people of the Maghreb simply have more progressive attitudes. This is far from being the case. Tripp shows us that, when surveyed on their attitudes, Maghrebis are often as conservative as their MENA counterparts, and Amazigh minorities are often as conservative as their Arab counterparts. As Tripp explains, “the way in which women’s rights reforms have been implemented [in the Maghreb], often in a top-down fashion, makes popular attitudes less relevant” (p. 93). Structural explanations are also rejected. For example, Tripp shows that, in terms of the gender gap in economic participation and educational attainment, the Maghreb countries do worse than several of their MENA neighbors and better than some others (p. 121).

Another tremendously important contribution is the book’s extensive interviews with protagonists involved in the strategic contestations that have led to constitutional and legislative reform. Tripp draws on conversations with “leaders and members of a variety of Islamist, feminist, and Amazigh women’s rights organizations; human rights organizations; members of parliament; leaders of the women’s legislative caucuses; women’s ministry representatives; party leaders; lawyers; religious leaders; academics; journalists; and representatives of donor and UN agencies” (p. 25). However, perhaps one shortcoming in this regard is the preponderance of feminist voices quoted in the book and the dearth of regime and Islamist voices. This leaves some questions regarding the factors underlying these latter actors’ evolving calculus. Most importantly, was the monumental transformation in Islamists’ positions on women’s rights only a result of pressure from the regime and of strategic calculations, or did deeper internal currents within Islamist movements also contribute to this evolution? In addition to interviews, Tripp also compiles an original database of legislation and constitutional reforms pertaining to women’s rights in the entire MENA region since independence, an invaluable resource for scholars interested in this subject.

Finally, the book addresses symbolic aspects of women’s rights: visibility, bodies, presence and representation, and the interpretive stakes that all the key players invested in them. This helps explain why women’s rights are such a central arena of contestation in the Maghreb and also more broadly in the MENA. In addition, and crucially, Tripp cautions us not to take the Maghreb’s experience as a simple tale of the triumph of women’s rights. The dilemmas of feminist bargaining with autocrats haunt Tripp’s narrative. Given how much reform has been implemented from the top down in the region, and how tainted the subject of women’s rights is by its association with authoritarian regimes’ strategizing, the advancements women have achieved in the Maghreb may not be as enduring as we might hope.