The Academic Research Institute in Iraq

WOMEN AND THE IRAQI UPRISING

Co-Sponsored by Cambridge University Press

January 28, 2021

Following the release of Dr. Zahra Ali’s book, “Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation”, Dr. Ali, Dr. Nadje Al-Ali, and Dr. Yasmin Chilmeran discussed the role that women, feminist discourses, and gender norms have had on the Iraqi uprising. The discussion was led and moderated by Dr. Dina Khoury.

DR. DINA KHOURY, MODERATOR

Dina Khoury is Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and a John Simon Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellow.  Her first book, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2002), for which she won the Turkish Studies Association and British Society of Middle Eastern Studies awards, explores the relationship between the Ottoman state and group of local power holders and urban gentry on the eastern Iraqi frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. Her latest book, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom and Remembrance, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), draws on government documents and interviews to argue that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance that transformed the manner in which Iraqis made claims to citizenship and expressed notions of selfhood. Her current book project is a study of the relationship of labor migration, capitalism and the development of documentation regimes in the northern parts of the Persian Gulf between the 1880s and 1930s.

Dr. Khoury also serves on the Board of TARII.

DR. ZAHRA ALI

Zahra Ali is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research explores dynamics of women and gender, social and political movements in relation to Islam(s), the Middle East and contexts of war and conflicts with a focus on contemporary Iraq. Ali engages with transnational and (post/de)colonial feminisms and epistemologies. She has conducted in depth ethnographic research among women, civil society and youth organizations in Iraq and has been published extensively (here, for a list). 

Women and Gender in Iraq: between Nation-building and Fragmentation (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a sociology of Iraqi women’s social, political activism and feminisms through an in-depth ethnography of postinvasion Iraqi women’s rights organizations. Through a transnational/postcolonial feminist approach Ali looks at the ways in which gender norms and practices, Iraqi feminist discourses and activisms are shaped and developed through state politics, competing nationalisms, religious, tribal and sectarian dynamics, as well as wars and economic sanctions.

DR. NADJE AL-ALI

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, with a focus on Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction (here, for a list of publications). Professor Al-Ali is on the advisory board of kohl: a journal of body and gender research and has been involved in several feminist organizations and campaigns transnationally.

DR. YASMIN CHILMERAN

Yasmin Chilmeran joined the Swedish Institute of International Affairs' Middle East Programme as a post-doctoral fellow in late 2020, where she is conducting research on women's participation in peacebuilding in Iraq and Syria. Dr. Chilmeran’s work focuses on women’s civil society, peace processes and the function of international gender frameworks in post-conflict settings, which includes researching the Women, Peace and Security agenda and its implementation. Her work focuses on Iraq and the MENA region more broadly. Dr Chilmeran completed her PhD in 2020 at Monash University's Centre for Gender, Peace and Security in Australia. Her doctoral research focused on women's participation in peacebuilding in post-2003 Iraq. She has also published co-authored pieces in Social Politics and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.