The researchers and writers of the Arab Human Development Report 2005 (AHDR 2005) Footnote ¹ include activists, social critics, intellectuals, and feminists who aspire for izdihār (flourishing) in the Arab world “based on a peaceful process of negotiation for redistributing power and building good governance.”Footnote ² This passage suggests that the aims the AHDR 2005 shares with the previous three volumes are to encourage state apparatuses and officials to transform themselves by changing policies and surrendering some of the power and resources they have fortified vis-à-vis their citizenries. This article argues that rather than encouraging the rise of women or any group interested in political or social transformation, the AHDR 2005 works within a U.N. development framework that strengthens states and political elites in relation to their populations by constituting the former as the causes of underdevelopment and thus the primary agents for economic, social, and political improvement.

Such a strategy shifts attention from the negative development impacts of neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, war, imperialism, and Western support for repressive regimes and opposition to democratic ones, as well as other varieties of inequitable North–South relations and histories. This strategy also reinforces the logic of national and transnational governmentalities, which are designed to blunt and co-opt social, economic, and political challenges that may fundamentally improve the situations of peoples in the Arab region. The U.N. development framework in fact gives little attention to oppositional forces and resistance movements as sources that create and compel development. The U.N. Development Programme's (UNDP) logic is particularly seductive because its focus on “good governance” and “well-being” seems to be at odds with, rather than complementary to, crass neoliberal capitalist interests and the realpolitik of Western states.

As other analysts have argued was the case with previous AHDR volumes,Footnote ³ the 2005 report is often disjointed in diagnosing causes and solutions for underdevelopment. The authors of the AHDR 2005 are frequently snared in the contradictions of using the report to make radical critiques of undemocratic and authoritarian Arab state regimes and repressive Western state policies within a discursive framework sponsored by the UNDP, paid for to some degree by wealthier Arab states, and whose purpose seems to be to reinforce economic, political, and cultural agendas supported largely by the United States and Western-dominated organizations. Indicating the conflicting agendas embodied in the AHDR 2005, in a foreword UNDP administrator Kemal Dervis remarkably attempts to distance the organization from parts of the AHDR 2005. Dervis calls for “moderation” and “arguments based on reason and respect for the views of the ‘other’” and criticizes the authors for “at times us[ing] language that is unnecessarily divisive.”Footnote ⁴

The dissonance is an inevitable rather than an unfortunate aberration given how the AHDRs and their authors are materially, politically, and discursively situated. Despite the critical and transformative aims of many of the authors involved in the AHDR 2005 who express their counterhegemonic positions and disagreements at various points, the report nevertheless fits within a development logic that reinforces rather than challenges Arab state power, Western state interests, and transnational governance. Given the AHDR 2005's material and discursive situatedness within the neoliberal human development framework, it is not surprising that it deploys the term “freedom” in ways that allow and disallow particular subjectivities and largely bypasses opposition or resistance as valuable sources of transformation in Arab societies. This development logic has consequences for how Arab women and their problems are represented.

Terms and translations have occasionally substantive implications in the AHDR 2005. The words “freedom” and “empowerment” have particular and delimited meanings in Western development discourse, which for at least two decades has targeted women of the global South as in special need of both. Although the word “empowerment” (tamkīn) is referenced in various UNDP online documents describing the AHDR and is used frequently in the English language AHDR 2005 document, it is translated as “rise” (nuhūḍ) in the English and Arabic titles of the AHDR 2005. The authors explain that the idea of the “rise” of women is more indigenous to Arabic than their “empowerment” and is preferred to “connote woman's struggle for her rights through the building of her capacity and its effective use in a conducive societal framework.”Footnote ⁵

It is invariably awkward to take a critical academic perspective on policy-oriented projects because the latter are governed by specific mandates, political logics, time regimes, methodologies, and funding structures. However, real-world projects are also saturated with philosophical and political assumptions that must be engaged because they can have very material consequences in the lives of groups targeted for transformation. Such assumptions frame and determine something to be a problem, are attached to methods that will measure and provide evidence of the problem, and are embedded in the suggested solutions.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF THE AHDR

Although the AHDR 2005 is more politically radical than previous volumes, it works within the same overall framework and assumptions. Like previous AHDR volumes, it assumes that Arab-identified states and territories are a coherent region (the positive or descriptive mode) and argues that they should be so (the normative mode) in development terms. One consequence is that the AHDR 2005 averages development indicators across states with very different levels of wealth by dint of belonging to the Arab world, criticisms also raised by Marc Lavergne regarding the AHDR 2003.Footnote ⁶ In a related contradiction that threads throughout the 2005 report, the authors call for unified state agendas based on Arab identity despite resource and ideological differences and regular competition and conflict among regional states and leaders. In a similar vein, the assumption that Arabs are part of a coherent community misses how all communities are fractured along a variety of socioeconomic, ideological, historical, and cultural axes.Footnote ⁷

As noted in a critique of AHDR 2003 by Brigitte Dumortier, regional political constructs such as the European Union are built over time and assumed to be contested projects rather than treated as reflecting “a brilliant common past.”Footnote ⁸ The former orientation realistically assumes that regional cooperation must be built so that the mutual benefits of bridges outweigh the one-sided benefits of borders.Footnote ⁹ If broad-based and inclusive development is truly a goal, regional unions or communities should not be limited to the interests of state, international, security/military, and corporate entities but should be built within and across state coordinates by workers, environmentalists, feminists, and other activists who can articulate demands; make rights-based claims; redistribute resources; and hold state, so-called nongovernmental, military/security, and corporate entities of any scale accountable for inequities, repression, and corruption.

Consistent with the conclusions of earlier AHDRs, the authors of the 2005 volume determine the Arab region to be on the bottom rung of world regions in terms of political and civil freedoms. It is axiomatic in the AHDRs that democracy deficits in Arab countries cause economic underdevelopment. Moreover, the solutions offered often reinforce “western and more specifically U.S. [economic, intellectual, political] influence on Arab societies.”Footnote ¹⁰ Critics of the causal connections made in previous volumes of the AHDR between democracy and development have drawn on converse empirical evidence from other countries and regions and deeper analysis of Arab societies to support their critiques.Footnote ¹¹

Such critics have also noted that the AHDRs ignore or understate, and certainly do not empirically measure, the degree to which the U.S. government reinforces repressive Arab states that support U.S. foreign and economic policies. Also slighted are regional histories of foreign or proxy military interventions, wars, and colonization (including by the State of Israel) that limit Arab states' sovereignty and development choicesFootnote ¹² and reinforce Arab state authoritarianism; Western state and corporate encouragement of (and profiteering from) military spending by Arab states, which reduces the potential for spending on human welfare;Footnote ¹³ and Western state and multinational corporate support for Arab state control and repression of popular demands for political accountability, representation, and fair distribution of wealth. United States political elites have historically been much more interested in stability rather than democracyFootnote ¹⁴ in Arab and other non-Western or previously colonized countries, particularly if they are perceived as friendly to U.S. economic and political interests.

In the AHDR 2005, the authors in fact strongly criticize U.S. foreign and domestic policies, including support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine; the invasion, occupation, and destruction of lives, heritages, and environment in Iraq; a wide-ranging “war on terror” deemed not to recognize legitimate struggles of resistance or dissent and to have encouraged further repression by Arab statesFootnote ¹⁵; and secret rendition, incarceration of Muslims without charge or trial, and torture that have involved some Arab governments.Footnote ¹⁶ The authors call “foreign occupations . . . grave violations of human rights.”Footnote ¹⁷ They further contend that current global governance systems are unfair toward less powerful states and selective in application of laws and policies, which reinforces hopelessness and extremism in the region.Footnote ¹⁸ Double standards are illustrated by reference to Western-government calls for elections and democracy but rejection of results they find unacceptable.Footnote ¹⁹

Critics have noted how previous AHDR volumes did not address “the inherent contradictions” between calls for “political, economic, and social freedoms.”Footnote ²⁰ As Dumortier argues in her critique of the 2003 volume, the AHDR reflects more than fifteen years of Western development logic that considers “development and globalization . . . as intrinsically linked” in contrast to “a growing number of more and more organized movements and networks [that] see the end of development coming with the advancement of [neoliberal] globalization.”Footnote ²¹ There are other examples of potential contradictions among “freedoms” assumed to be in accord with each other. Privatization, state deregulation, and liberalization for foreign investment, for instance, often reinforce inequities, maldistribution of resources, and less entrepreneurship in Arab states.Footnote ²² State repression has sometimes produced resistant explosions of knowledge and information, thus expanding freedoms in these arenas.Footnote ²³ Moreover, one can have “knowledge” and not widespread “material well-being.”Footnote ²⁴ In addition, conservative movements taking state power through fair elections may decrease the freedoms of some social sectors.

Illustrating their complex positioning, the authors of the AHDR 2005 state at one point that unfettered economic globalization is based on mechanisms and existing resource distributions whereby the most economically and politically powerful countries become more powerful, immiserating Third World men and women by exporting Northern “‘industrial garbage’ in environmental, social, and economic terms to the countries of the South.”Footnote ²⁵ The authors at other points also contradict the development value of neoliberal structural adjustment and privatization policies because Arab professional women are disproportionately employed by state or public sectors in the region.Footnote ²⁶

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ON WOMEN'S STATUS

The AHDR 2005 findings and recommendations with respect to women's status at times work within Western neoliberal development and global gender frameworks and at other times challenge them. In terms of poverty and work, the AHDR 2005 findings are inconsistent with the global assumption underlying international development discourse that women are poorer than men; Arab women in the five states for which the researchers had data are not poorer than their countrymen, although the report finds that women are “deprived of opportunities to acquire capabilities and use them to secure the elements of human welfare.”Footnote ²⁷ The authors also find that Arab women's economic participation in formal labor markets remains the lowest in the world, with only one third of girls and women fifteen years or older employed,Footnote ²⁸ although they criticize international comparative development statistics for underestimating and undervaluing women's participation in informal economies and unpaid household work.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, they contend that women “pay a high price under the rules of the new market” in the Arab region, found most often in “free economic zones” that provide some women with “insecure temporary work contracts and humiliating work conditions.”Footnote ³⁰ Such work conditions make the additional value of higher labor-force participation unclear for Arab women who cannot attain high-status jobs.Footnote ³¹

In terms of marriage- and family-related laws, the AHDR 2005 authors assume that legal codification is good for women and necessary in order to discourage “traditions” that limit their options and opportunities.Footnote ³² They call for the limited number of Arab states that have not done so yet to codify, in “clear” and “precise” terms, personal status laws.Footnote ³³ The report at times assumes that lack of codification explains the “conservative and resistant” nature of laws related to family lifeFootnote ³⁴; yet, in fact, gender inequality with respect to guardianship, child custody, marriage, and divorce exists and can be transformed in state-codified or noncodified forms. The AHDR 2005 calls for all marriage and divorce-related negotiations to occur through state courts, including requiring reconciliation processes monitored by the state, and commends the Egyptian family courts for restructuring that allowed reinforcement of such state power.Footnote ³⁵ The authors of the AHDR 2005 make clear their disapproval of the rise of consensual sexual and marital contracts that are not registered with state authorities.Footnote ³⁶ The expansion of state power in these arenas is seen to be for the protection of women, although it seems to have further empowered the state over both men and women.

On women's rights on a broader scale, the authors of the AHDR 2005 argue that Arab states must increase freedoms in line with international law and protocols. Ubiquitous is the report's call for full implementation and stronger enforcement mechanisms, presumably by non-Arab states, of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), especially as applied to personal-status laws.Footnote ³⁷ The support for CEDAW is the most consistent recommendation in the AHDR 2005, although at one point the authors worry that normative texts such as CEDAW “cannot represent the particularity of local struggles on the ground or all civic demands on the international front.”Footnote ³⁸ Indicating how they are contradictorily situated between indigenous and Western hegemonic discourses, the authors argue that CEDAW articles can be consistent with Muslim cultural sensibilities by opening the door to what is called ijtihād (dynamic exegesis based on the Qurʾan).Footnote ³⁹ However, as Lila Abu-Lughod points out in her essay in this issue, AHDR 2005 authors do not engage with the various ways in which Muslim women activists in the region, working within Islamic discourse and texts, have for years been making epistemological and practical challenges to male-biased practices and beliefs.Footnote ⁴⁰

The AHDR 2005 recommends state implementation of CEDAWFootnote ⁴¹ despite the fact that many, even the vast majority, of poorer Muslim women will reject the CEDAW premise of total gender equality with regard to housing provision, economic maintenance of the marital home and children, and child support in case of divorce, given that Islamic jurisprudence has historically placed great emphasis on male responsibility in these arenas. Indeed, this “traditional” logic may explain why poverty and economic well-being in Arab countries are not necessarily feminized and masculinized. The CEDAW approach, Shaheen Sardar Ali contends, assumes “that underdevelopment and gender inequality in the Third World are caused by traditional values and social structures.” She argues further that the women's rights discourse that frames CEDAW is too often taken for granted as universally applicable to all women when it is embedded in Western liberal histories and notions of self and family. The CEDAW framework ignores that “in the African and Asian contexts most women rely on entitlements embodied in family and community relationships that do not relate to ‘equal rights’ language. Similarly, religion forms an important part of many women's identity. They are not comfortable with being asked to frame their identities within a discourse that is avowedly secular.”Footnote ⁴² The point here is that Arab Muslim women, especially the vast majority who are poor or working class, may have good cultural and material reasons to prefer indigenous frameworks or to insist on improving such frameworks rather than replacing them with CEDAW.

On political representation, the AHDR 2005 authors argue that development requires societies of freedom and good governance in which states ensure “citizens' well-being and their security.”Footnote ⁴³ They contend that “good governance” requires the inclusion of women through quotas and “positive discrimination” if necessary.Footnote ⁴⁴ The authors criticize Arab governments for responding to criticism of authoritarian or undemocratic practices by initiating surface reformsFootnote ⁴⁵ and recognize that selective focus by Arab states on improving women's status allows these states to avoid more fundamental transformations while pleasing Western donors and states whose putative concern for Arab women often seems to be a fetish.Footnote ⁴⁶

Further in this critical vein, the authors of the AHDR 2005 note that Western actors often mobilize a rights discourse in “crass,” even theatrical, “crusades” to “free” womenFootnote ⁴⁷ and have demonstrated they have little trouble imposing preferred gender regimes by force. This makes it difficult for local gender-transformational projects to succeed and helps to produce stark absolutes in the region whereby gender equality projects are often understood and constructed as cover for Western imperialism and women gender activists are represented as inauthentic.Footnote ⁴⁸ The authors challenge such oppositional or binary cultural distinctions (e.g., West vs. East) in Arab countries and encourage collaboration with international women's organizations.Footnote ⁴⁹ Given the authors' critique of the forcible imposition of alternative gender regimes by foreigners, the report is equivocal in its assessment of postcolonial Tunisia, whose more equitable gender laws and policies have largely been the result of an authoritarian state project. At points the authors criticize the lack of democracy and space for civil-society organizations in Tunisia, and at other points they applaud Tunisia's unparalleled “progress” on women's rights.Footnote ⁵⁰

“HUMAN DEVELOPMENT” AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST GOVERNMENTALITY

A major problem with the AHDR 2005 is that it constitutes women as a global category. This essay contends that international measures such as the human development index (HDI) and the “global women's rights” discourse used by the UNDP and other Western international organizations selectively authorize subjectivities, freedoms, and transformations. The HDI and global women's rights discourse are part and parcel of transnational feminist governmentalities, which manage, normalize, and even constitute a range of inequalities among women. They also often facilitate militarized and humanitarian interventions rather than encourage fundamental improvements in most women's lives. The authors of the AHDR 2005 generally work within these hegemonic development and women's rights discourses, although they occasionally challenge them as well.

Assuming gender to be a superordinate axis of identity and location imagines alliances between women while underplaying economic, labor, ideological, religious, ethnic, political, and other divisions and differences among women within Arab countries, across Arab countries, and in relation to different groups of women in the remainder of the world. Womanness on its own is a reductive axis for transformational projects. However, gender conceived in this manner is often the basis for much of the global, international, and transnational activism and interventions, especially when targeting “oppressed” women living in or from Third World countries.

In such a global feminist framework, all women are marked as subjects of male victimization and violence worldwide. Indeed, Third World women are often perceived to be additionally victimized by their cultures, what Uma Narayan has critically termed “death by culture.”Footnote ⁵¹ Arab men and women are included in such global patterns of gender oppression and victimization, although women's bad lot is perceived to be compounded by their Arab and Muslim cultural values and practices. Within such understandings, the major task of intervention is to have Arab and other oppressed women “recognize” this global subject-position, which requires them to gain a universalized understanding of womanhood. The AHDR 2005 works within such a global gender framework, which constitutes Arab women as part of a world population of victimized women with shared interests in biopolitical terms.Footnote ⁵² This global gender positioning is operative despite evidence to the contrary, including the AHDR 2005's findings of high rates of Arab disapproval for violence against women.Footnote ⁵³

The AHDRs rely to a large degree on the HDI established on the basis of economist Amartya Sen's reasonable contention that gross national product (GNP) is an inadequate measure of the well-being and quality of life of people within countries. The HDI is a composite measure of “average achievements” for states that encompasses three dimensions: life expectancy, educational enrollments and literacy levels, and economic “standard of living” defined by a “logarithm of [per capita] income.”Footnote ⁵⁴ More important than GNP, Sen argues, are factors such as “distribution of resources,” their impact on people's lives, life expectancies, health care, work availability, educational access, and so on.Footnote ⁵⁵ These factors, Sen insists, better evaluate a person's “advantage” in terms of her ability to “achieve” “various ‘functionings’” in daily life.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of great importance, this approach does not ensure resources but is concerned with everyone having the “capability to compete for and secure” them.Footnote ⁵⁷ As feminist analysts of mainstream development agendas note, “Though Sen's focus on capabilities provides a framework for the study of empowerment, feminists need to be wary of . . . his lack of attention to the political processes required for equitable resource distribution that could lead to general empowerment.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The principal researchers of the first AHDR, in particular Egyptian economist Nader Fergany, controversially “innovated” the HDI into an alternative Arab HDI (AHDI) to assess development in the Middle East and North Africa region. The AHDI adds a “freedom score” to measure “enjoyment of civil and political liberties.” It includes a measure for “internet hosts per-capita” and has a “carbon dioxide emissions per-capita” penalty. It also excludes the income measure of the HDI in order to “de-emphasise the importance of average income.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The AHDR 2005 relies on the HDI and not AHDI rankings in the appended tables, although its chapters are conceptually organized to address political and civil freedoms.

Building on Sen's theory and working with him under U.N. auspices, liberal feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum further contends that because transnational comparative data indicate women as a category to be worse off than men as a category in “most parts of the world,” and women's presumed generalized subordination means they do not necessarily have the “expectations and desires” they would have if they were not subordinated, a cross-national “nonrelative” index assessing women's “capabilities” across cultures and states was necessary.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this “global” understanding, women cannot be asked what they want because they would simply “affirm the status quo.”Footnote ⁶¹ Nussbaum's “Aristotelian approach” assumes that there is “a single objective account of the human good, or human flourishing,” and a single morality, the underlying features of which must be found, presumably after peeling off “all local traditions.”Footnote ⁶²

Two additional capabilities measures informed by these ideas were developed for the HDRs in the mid-1990s: the gender-related development index (GDI), a composite of the HDI measures adjusted for gender disparities, and the gender empowerment measure (GEM) to evaluate women's “agency,” defined as their economic and political opportunities.Footnote ⁶³ The GEM index used in the AHDR 2005 is composed of a ratio of male-to-female income per capita and the percentage of female professional and technical workers, female legislators or senior officials in government, and female-held parliamentary seats.Footnote ⁶⁴ The 2005 report includes GEM and GDI rankings for the Arab countries for which the researchers had dataFootnote ⁶⁵ and integrates the substantive concerns of those two measures.

Constituting women as a world population is critical to what Inderpal Grewal terms the “transnational production of global feminist subjects” of governance that aims to improve their well-being.Footnote ⁶⁶ This now hegemonic trend of practice and discourse has been termed transnational feminist governmentalityFootnote ⁶⁷ and has been criticized by some feminist scholars and activists. Governmentality, according to Michel Foucault, is a “complex form of power” applied by states to reinforce themselves. It aims to “establish a continuity” between the head of state and the individuals governed so that in a “well-run” state, “individuals will . . . behave as they should.” The “ultimate end” of governmentality is “the welfare of the population [“above all else”], the improvement of its condition, the increase in its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” This form of power relies on the statistical enumeration of populations and their problems and specific apparatuses to maintain social order, and it requires the development of certain areas of knowledge and tactics.Footnote ⁶⁸ From a governmentality perspective, the idea that there is a “boundary between the state and civil society is . . . an effect of power” that serves to reinforce the state and mystify the range of circuits and mutual dependencies that exist between formally state and nonstate apparatuses (e.g., religious institutions, nonprofit organizations, universities, banks, and corporate entities).Footnote ⁶⁹

James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta have been among the theorists who have articulated the related idea of “transnational governmentalities” to capture the similar workings and techniques of transnational and supranational governance structures and discourses dominated by the interests of powerful states and groups but ostensibly focused on the “well-being” of people in the world.Footnote ⁷⁰ The UNDP is arguably the most powerful and wealthy of the multilateral organizations working in the capacity of transnational governmentality. According to its website,

The range of apparatuses, processes, and discourses associated with transnational governmentality has been particularly salient since the 1980s. Among other things, transnational governmentalities discursively construct “global civil society” as separate from “global governance” structures, and states as distinct from international government systems, although these domains operate in mutually constitutive relationships, as indicated in the previous passage from the UNDP website.Footnote ⁷² In addition, such differentiations mystify the actual centers of gravity in terms of power and resources, thus blunting frontal challenges.

Organizations such as DAWN, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, have long recognized that development projects do not “give principal emphasis to the basic survival needs of the majority of the world's people.”Footnote ⁷³ Such development paradigms historically assumed that “women's main [problem] in the Third World was insufficient participation in an otherwise benevolent process of growth and development,” even as the first U.N. Decade for Women (1975–85), with its explosion of development projects, coexisted with dramatic worsening of the socioeconomic situations for the majority of Third World women and men, as well as increased militarization, foreign interventions, and domestic repression.Footnote ⁷⁴ This sort of feminist critique of mainstream development recognizes that “intermeshing” repressive processes occur in and between households, communities, markets, and states; it does not singularly invest any of them with the power to improve lives.Footnote ⁷⁵

Transnational feminist governmentalities (TFGs) emerged most powerfully in the 1980s, facilitated by various U.N. and other global governance and global civil-society organizations. TFGs rely on comparative statistical practices and underplay significant power and resource differentials among people in the world and more equitable relations and distributions. Grewal argues that the now normalized “women's rights as human rights” narrative and the focus on women as objects of development by many organizations are what Foucault calls “regimes of truth” that move through various transnational connectivities and produce new subjectivities, hierarchies, and subjugation.Footnote ⁷⁶ For example, at the same time that transnational feminist governmentalities construct a global population of women with shared interests, they discursively divide women into those who are ethical and free and those who are not, facilitating projects to “rescue” and “liberate” putatively unfree women.Footnote ⁷⁷

Even when global feminist narratives were anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist, Grewal found that they often ignored “historical contingency and context, addressing difference solely within a notion of nonconflictual pluralism or even beyond relativism to a narrative of oppressions that could easily fit into a common framework [in which all women fit] rather than disrupting it.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In addition to essentializing women's and men's “natures,” transnational feminist governmental processes authenticate the suffering and deprivation imposed by postcolonial, rather than Western, state regimes; normalize the rise of neoliberal market globalization and militarized humanitarianism, which are posited as concerned with rights, freedoms, and citizenship; and help to “manage” the continuing crisis of growing inequalities worldwide.Footnote ⁷⁹

Naheed Gina Aaftaab has shown how the post-9/11 U.S. attack on Afghanistan was discursively facilitated by representations of “Afghan women” as a “flattened trope that overlooks the contradictions and complexities in global power relations, and it was used to justify a masculine narrative that shows the United States to be the savior of the powerless women under the Taliban.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Aaftaab further argues that dominant “gender development theories,” articulated most influentially by the UNDP in its human development reports, also “support and strengthen the justifications of [military] violence” against Afghanis.Footnote ⁸¹ In these HDRs, as noted previously, states are evaluated on their success in providing women with more individual “choices” that “build” their “human capabilities,” thus allowing them to overcome “adversities” and increase their potential for living “the good life.”Footnote ⁸² Aaftaab argues that such assumptions and their attached measures draw on “liberal development, democratic governance, and capitalist individualisms” to form “a powerful trinity that support[s] current power structures, though through dynamic methods.”Footnote ⁸³

In criticizing the AHDR framework and the HDRs on a more broad scale, I am bypassing the debate among philosophers, anthropologists, and others as to whether “universalism is ethnocentric,” as Seyla Benhabib has asked in her advocacy for the development of “cosmopolitan legal norms” with respect to human rights, including women's rights.Footnote ⁸⁴ I agree with Benhabib and other postcolonial feminist scholars coming from a range of theoretical orientations that constructions of East and West as mutually exclusive, “hermetically sealed,” pure, or univocal in their ethical or cultural orientations are the anxious and sometimes strategically deployed myths of Westerners and Easterners who often have shallow knowledge of histories, theoretical frameworks, and practices not their own or who simply want to resist transformations that require them to give up some of their power and resources.Footnote ⁸⁵ I disagree with Benhabib, however, as to the potential of global civil society.Footnote ⁸⁶

The process of at once globalizing women and comparatively situating their status in different nation–states within a hierarchical configuration is not distant from the subjugating grids of colonial and modernization projects. Such indexing relies on generalizations often inadvertently reproduced in the AHDR 2005, including that Arab women are automatically victims of patriarchy, culture, and men, with women from certain social groups—bedouin communities, villages, squatter settlements, and poor women in general—highlighted as particularly marginalized.Footnote ⁸⁷ At some points, and in keeping with philosophy of the HDRs, such women are assumed to be lacking in the knowledge to free themselves, escape, or imagine a different future; thus they need rescue.Footnote ⁸⁸ Indeed, the AHDR 2005 too often represents poor women as too poor, illiterate, and otherwise subjugated to conceptualize rights and recognize themselves in individual terms.Footnote ⁸⁹

ARAB CULTURE IN THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2005

In his assessment of the AHDR 2003, Lavergne notes the “anachronistic” treatment of “Arab culture,” which he argues is often essentialized and treated in “fixed” and “a-historical” terms.Footnote ⁹⁰ The AHDR 2005 also suffers from various reifications of Arab culture. This includes an essentializing perspective on familial affiliations, broadly defined, which are often constructed as backward, static, and unchangingFootnote ⁹¹ rather than imbricated in and often reinvented through other political, social, and economic landscapes. Family relations are represented in the report as “governed by the father's authority over his children and the husband's over his wife, under the sway of the patriarchal order.” However, as evidence of the report's contradictions, the authors note that “the Arab family” is “too complex to be summed up in one generalised and absolute characterisation.”Footnote ⁹²

The AHDR 2005 often treats Arab societies as exceptionally patriarchal. Postcolonial Arab states, the report contends, have a “symbiotic relationship” with patriarchy.Footnote ⁹³ Rather than recognizing how patriarchal ideologies, broadly defined, are context produced, plural, and mutating, the AHDR 2005 relies on the essentialist idea of an “inner,” distinctly Arab genealogical line that connects “primitive forms” of patriarchy with contemporary forms, following Hisham Sharabi's influential theory of “neopatriarchy.”Footnote ⁹⁴ For example, Islam's encouragement of establishing a community (umma) that challenged tribal affiliations is ahistorically juxtaposed against the continued existence of “Arab tribes” who have “preserved their authoritarian structures unchanged.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In a similar vein, Arab legislative sexism is explained to be the result of tribalismFootnote ⁹⁶ rather than evidence of male-dominated institutions that favor the legal interests of men, just as predominantly Western institutions privilege Western interests and so on.

Unaddressed in the AHDR 2005 is how colonial, imperial, and capitalist styles of intervention (often of the divide-and-rule variety) into the affairs of particular localities, industries, and states have required, coproduced, and empowered modern patriarchies. In the contemporary period, Western economic and political leaders regularly deploy patriarchal methods to install, reinforce, or support agreeable sovereigns. Present-day Iraq, where many apparatuses of the U.S. government have constituted and empowered “tribal” structures in order to contain resistance, is only one example of these methods.Footnote ⁹⁷ These sovereigns/fathers are expected to rule resistant populations and control resources in their bounded territories in return for payment or other support. Failure to be an amenable or successful sovereign often results in various economic and military punishments from more powerful countries. These Western practices do not simply reflect indigenous patriarchal values. Rather, they constitute and revive them in the face of indigenous challenges of various sorts.

Lavergne contends that the AHDR 2003 often juxtaposes, without clearly defining, constructs such as “tradition/al” and “modern/ity,” thus undermining the dynamic, hybrid, and pluralistic nature of Arab societies historically.Footnote ⁹⁸ In such a construct, “backwardness” is associated with “tradition,” misrecognizing the degree to which study and knowledge (the focus of the 2003 report) are highly respected, even among the uneducated in the region.Footnote ⁹⁹ A dichotomy of modernity versus tradition is regularly reinforced in the AHDR 2005 as well. Modernity is associated with innovation, individuality, and openness, and tradition evokes conformity, collectivism, impermeability, and religious subjectivity.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For example, one claim in the report constructs “large social sectors” as “still remain[ing] closer to tradition than to innovation,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ ignoring the dynamism and complexity, even beauty, of many cultural values and practices in the region. In another example, the report contrasts “conservative [Arabic satellite] channels” that provide religious programming with “numerous channels that claim modernity [but] in fact project a demeaning portrayal of women, seen mainly as physical bodies and mere commodities.”Footnote ¹⁰² However, the objectification and commodification of women and sexuality more generally are the bread and butter of modern capitalism and difficult to define as traditional.

“Tradition” and “backwardness” seem to be associated with religiosity in the report, as has occurred in previous AHDRs.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, the 2005 report often constructs religious subjectivities as closed and unitary rather than dynamic and plurally experienced, although it attempts to distinguish between practices associated with “custom” and “culture” (such as female clitoridectomy) on the one hand—which are viewed as retrograde, patriarchal, and resistant to change—and “pure religion”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ on the other. The goal is too often the “liberation” of Arab women from the suffering caused by “custom,” “tradition,” or “conservative tradition.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Defining tradition and modernity in oppositional terms makes it difficult to recognize the dynamism of many traditions and innovations that mobilize “tradition” in strategic or selective terms. To further illustrate the problematic of this binary, modern science is represented in the report as necessary to “restrict the scope of conservative thinking, traditional knowledge and regressive attitudes”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ despite the fact that science and social science also produce knowledge and ways of organizing the world that facilitate and legitimate social inequality.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In sum, the AHDR 2005 indicates little recognition of modernizing agendas as sometimes accompanied by their own types of repression and violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

EMPOWERMENT AND FREEDOM IN THE AHDR 2005

As I noted previously, the AHDR 2005 relies on an underlying discursive formation—shared with most internationally oriented projects focused on “women's development” or “empowerment”— that constitutes women as a unitary victimized population in global, regional, cultural, or national terms. Such a discourse elides differences among women, so problems they may face are treated as epiphenomenal results of their gender.

Using a global gender discourse to explain and posit solutions for women's “underdevelopment,” moreover, situates the analytical lens on “local” cultural practices, values, and beliefs, which are often homogenized, treated ahistorically, and assumed to be static in the AHDR 2005. This global gender discourse underestimates the extent to which foreign and Western interests in Arab and other states are imbricated in constituting a range of inequalities from which they benefit. Such a global discourse of any scale (e.g., focused on “Arab” or “Muslim” women) also normalizes, and thus participates in constituting, boys and men as part of a unitary category existing in fundamental opposition to girls and women. This global gender formation is hegemonic in the AHDR 2005, as it is in much Western development discourse, structuring the gathering, framing, and analysis of empirical evidence, even if results at times seem to challenge these assumptions.

In examining the meaning of empowerment, I take seriously Jane L. Parpart, Shirin M. Rai, and Kathleen Staudt's reasoning that we should worry when such “diverse and contradictory institutions as the World Bank, Oxfam and many more radical nongovernmental organizations” agree that “empowerment” is an “unquestioned ‘good.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Empowerment is quite slippery in its deployments and consequences. When empowerment approaches become more successful at destabilizing “established power structures,” Parpart contends, “they will certainly no longer be the darling of all participants in the development enterprise.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The AHDR 2005 is produced within an international development framework that empowers states over people's lives, avoids frontal challenges to inequality or oppression on any scale, and underestimates the degree to which postcolonial states are often more dependent upon and accountable to the goodwill of more powerful states than to their own citizens. The authors of the AHDR 2005 indeed contend at one point that “empowerment” is a saturated and contested term and that dominant development agendas have focused on reinforcing individual rather than collective paths to power.Footnote ¹¹¹

Critics of previous AHDRs have noted a dynamic of ignoring what Mark Levine calls “politics from below,” which in Morocco, for example, “forced the state to devote increasing resources to the welfare of the people.”Footnote ¹¹² In his critique of the AHDR 2004, Asef Bayat similarly faults the transformation “from above” orientation of the report and the little attention it devotes to social movements in Arab states and territories. The report, Bayat argues, is marked by “distrust of ‘politics from below’” and a “liberal perception of the ‘state’ as the neutral apparatus representing the public interests, a notion deeply embedded in the conceptual paradigms which inform the general vision of the UNDP and World Bank.”Footnote ¹¹³ Such orientations are logical given the transnational governmentality agendas and assumptions discussed previously. The AHDR 2005 similarly assumes states to be potential givers and guarantors of rights, distributors of resources, and agents of change. However, as a number of theorists of the state have argued, the longevity of particular regimes or states to a large degree depends on not questioning their naturalness as loci of power and resource control.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The 2005 report approvingly repeats the hegemonic logic of transnational governmentality, in this case represented by the UNDP: national governments, nongovernmental organizations, and other civil-society organizations should work in tandem.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The primary focus on state reform assisted by civil-society actors elides other means of transformation, including social movements and revolts of various sorts, although the AHDR 2005 is contradictory. For example, the authors at one point call for building movements and “historic struggle . . . [against] the current power structure.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ They also recognize and applaud movements such as Egypt's Kifaya, which “openly opposes the President's reelection and the transfer of power to his son.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The AHDR 2005 authors even directly challenge the agendas of “[w]omen's empowerment projects sponsored by Western organisations and support funds” and deem them not threatening to “any political system.” Such women's empowerment projects, the authors argue,

For the most part, however, the AHDR 2005 recommends that “civil-society organizations” ally with “politically neutral international and U.N. organizations working for women's achievement.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The AHDR 2005 exhibits little self-consciousness about the imposed nature of a “women's empowerment agenda” or increasing the power of national and transnational governance apparatuses that have little accountability. Indeed, at some points,Footnote ¹²⁰ the authors recommend a degree of external or foreign pressure on Arab states on gender issues and seem unconcerned about internal resistance to this.

As noted, the capabilities approach of the UNDP privileges “objective” and universal priorities and measures over locally defined and articulated preferences on the premise that people constructed as targets of development do not necessarily know what they need or may make choices that support the status quo.Footnote ¹²¹ The AHDR 2005 often applies this logic to prognostications of development problems and suggested solutions. Despite the ubiquitous notion of freedom in this and previous AHDRs, the report significantly underestimates how differently situated men and women perceive gains and losses differently—and as a result might make choices and have desires that are not legible within the grids and recommendations provided in the AHDR.

Part of the problem is an essentialized understanding of selfhood, including its gendered aspects, as existing outside of or apart from various locations, experiences, and subjectification processes. In such a view, women who might resist proposed empowerment plans are understood as either victims suffering from “false consciousness” or as liberal subjects for whom various obstacles, including “customs” and “habits,” stand in the way of gaining objective freedoms and choices.Footnote ¹²² This may be why the 2005 report does not interrogate why so many women are involved in Salafi, Muslim Brotherhood, or other “traditional” projects perceived by them as empowering and yet not necessarily acknowledged as such within Western development rubrics.

The authors of the 2005 report call for recognition rather than state repression of Islamist activism in Arab public spheres, although with significant hesitation and ambivalence. At certain points, they paint Salafi movements (which construct themselves as harkening to rebuild a Muslim community similar to the one that surrounded the Prophet) as repressive and limiting women to private-sphere gender roles, especially as mothers and wives. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) is seen to at least support “women's political rights and [endorse] their inclusion in electoral life.” The AHDR 2005 authors nevertheless express anxiety regarding the positions of such Islamist “middle-ground” movements toward personal status laws and “the civil and political rights of minority communities.”Footnote ¹²³

Coexisting with such openings is a narrative of Islamist groups as representatives of backwardness or a strictly instrumental view of them as empowered by states to weaken leftist and liberal forces.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, such organizations differ in ideologies, practices, and strategies and change over time. This makes the “Islamist” adjective a feeble basis of distinction from a social-justice or feminist perspective. To be more specific, charges of misogyny, repression, arrogance, lack of transparency, narrow exclusivism, corruption, and other evils could just as well be lodged against a range of non-Islamist movements, parties, and organizations.

In an inset box in the AHDR 2005, Heba Ezzat, an Egyptian intellectual and activist, stresses the necessity of serious encounters between indigenous feminists of secular varieties and Islamists, as well as the contemporary challenges of such a dialogue:

In addition to illustrating the plural messages represented in the AHDR 2005, this statement challenges unitary and universalistic notions of freedom, empowerment, and development, including of the feminist varieties. Ezzat instead calls for recognition of and mutual engagement with the range of ways people in the region live, identify, and aspire for betterment. Also embedded in her statement is the urgent necessity to transform in Habermasian terms communication spheres and the rules of discourse in the Arab region so that all social sectors can articulate, contest, and debate their needs, priorities, and aspirations. Such transformation is occurring through individual and collective efforts and in spite of a range of repressive forces interested only in imposing their own visions.