In Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring, the book’s editors Rita Stephan and Mounira M. Charrad, together with their contributors, document women’s activism across modern and historical episodes of contention in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The edited volume situates women’s engagement during the 2010–11 Arab Uprisings within a long history of women’s mobilization in the region. The collective analyses provide a survey of women’s activism within and outside routine politics and traces their activism across multiple sites and arenas. Women’s collective action in and beyond the Arab Spring, the contributors in the volume underscore, is fundamentally hybrid; it is shot through with multiple meanings and histories. Through the personal stories, reflections, and narratives put forward in this volume, readers step into women’s protests, recall memories of resistance, celebrate successes, and mourn losses.

The book offers a nuanced understanding of women’s activism and highlights their diverse experiences in collective action. The editors bring together scholars, activists, artists, and politicians from across the MENA region who put forward diverse perspectives from various disciplines and capture marginalized voices from different ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, and sexual orientations. Some of these voices have not traditionally been captured in political science scholarship and are often overlooked in mainstream analysis of women’s activism. The book rather provides a historical reading and an interdisciplinary survey of women’s struggles against interdependent oppressive structures in the region.

Building on rich empirical data, personal narratives, and historical accounts, the authors locate women’s agency, activism, and hope, notwithstanding past disappointments and present setbacks in the region. With nearly 50 contributors, the book covers a wide geographical scope. The contributions cover individual stories and group narratives of activism and resistance in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, in addition to Arab women’s transnational activism in diaspora communities. Through their analysis, the chapters’ authors illuminate how women’s activism has challenged different patriarchal structures and subverted their logic across the region.

The book is divided into 5 parts and 40 chapters, with each part covering a key question related to women’s activism. Parts I and II closely examine women’s grievances and their collective action frames. The analysis in part I surveys the different demands put forward by women and how they challenge interdependent patriarchal structures. Authors highlight the effects of class oppression on women workers in Egypt, of colonial agendas on queer issues in Palestine, of societal taboos on campaigns against pedophilia in Morocco, of militarism on women’s nonviolence resistance in Syria, and of fundamentalism on women’s engagement in the Yemeni uprising. In resisting these oppressive structures, as authors emphasize in part II, women frame their demands using new and inherited cultural materials and historical framings of political struggles. The analysis underscores how collective action frames are culturally and politically embedded and are the outcomes of women’s ideologies and beliefs as well as the shifting opportunities and constraints at the time of contention.

In parts III–V, the authors illuminate the creative media, peripheral arenas, and repertoires of contention used by women in their struggle. Part III traces how women, queers, and other marginalized communities express their agency and carry out their activism through arts, songs, blogs, films, and literature. Through these creative media, activist groups aim to transform apathetic bystanders into sympathizers and, they hope, participants. Their activism transgresses power centers and peripheral arenas. Activists and scholars in part IV survey women’s activism in some of these arenas: family-based protests in Libya, women’s marches during the First Intifada in Palestine, celebrations of Women’s Day on Baghdad streets, and anti-harassment campaigns online and on graphite walls in Egypt. The analysis eloquently unpacks how activists shifted their roles across different arenas and interactions by deploying a myriad of strategies. The book concludes with a survey of women’s resistance strategies within and outside institutional political and legal channels. It illuminates how women’s repertoires of contention range from creative gradual disruptions, as in the case of reform campaigns in Morocco, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, to direct confrontations as in the case of the Egyptian revolution.

The analysis engages with the traditions of feminist theories and social movements literature. Yet, given the diverse contributors, the chapters vary in their engagement with contentious politics literature and in applying social movement theories. Some chapters are translated interviews, personal reflections, and memoirs, whereas others strictly follow a research format. Although the chapters vary in their theoretical contributions, they all offer rich analysis and significant empirical insight. The volume’s interdisciplinary structure and diverse format position it as an excellent source not only for scholars of political sociology, gender politics, and women’s studies but also for the wider audience beyond academia. In so doing, the volume reflects the essence of the field of gender and women’s studies as it contributes to raising awareness of gender issues in the borders of society.

The book also contributes to the growing literature on women’s engagement in the Arab Spring and resists how “Western, transnational, and even Third World feminisms” (p. 4) portray women and their activism in the region. Stephan and Charrad challenge the image of the passive Middle Eastern women and refute claims that view women’s activism as coerced or misguided. Rather, they draw attention to women’s mundane everyday resistance as well as collective action against multilayered and interdependent systems of oppression and structures of inequalities. In so doing, their edited volume expands the contours of Third world feminist literature to include the specific and differential experiences of women such as women in the oil rich Gulf monarchies. The analysis highlights women’s different identities and shifting positionalities and how they shape women’s experiences in collective action and limit or expand opportunities for resistance.

Rising Women: In and Beyond the Middle East delivers theoretical and empirical insights to the field of Middle East, gender and women’s studies. Stephan and Charrad bring together different stories of resistances and diverse voices of change and thus challenge essentialist and ahistorical readings of women and gender in the region. The book offers significant contribution to our stock of knowledge on women’s engagement and activism in and beyond the Arab Spring.