Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

Two quick things, in case you haven't seen them:

1) Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, passed away today. Her work for reforestation and democratic renewal in Kenya has been incredibly important; along with Shirin Ebadi, she's probably my favorite of the recent Nobel Laureates.

I learned about her death today through an email by the president of HWS; it turns out that Prof. Maathai's two children attended HWS, and she is a former awardee of the Blackwell Medal, honoring the first woman doctor in the US, who trained here. Appropriately enough, tomorrow my introduction to comparative world politics students begin talking about what constitutes democracy. I'll be showing them the tribute video that was shown during her award ceremony, to introduce them to her work, and giving them this quote from her speech at the ceremony:

Initially, tree planting was a very benign activity, and nobody bothered us because it was mostly a bunch of women getting together and teaching each other how to plant trees. But it became important also to teach them the other aspect of the linkage that I talked about: the linkage of governance. It's one thing to manage the resource, another to touch governance. Now who is in charge of resources, especially resources like forest, water, soil and land? It's usually the government that’s in charge. The people in power are usually in charge of these resources. And when you talk about managing those resources sustainably, accountably, transparently, sharing these resources equitably, you are stepping on the very big toes of those in power.

When we started talking about the importance of protecting forests and rivers, it meant that we would have to explain to the people in power how the resources were being poorly managed and how sometimes they are privatized by the people who are in charge, and how sometimes you get mismanagement, like illegal logging and cultivation in the forests. We started realizing that it is very important to hold our leaders accountable for the way they manage resources because they are not the owners of the resources; they are custodians. We put them in positions of authority to manage the resources for us because all of us cannot be managers. They are not supposed to privatize them, they are not supposed to own them and they are not supposed to exploit them to enrich themselves all at our expense.

When we started pointing out these problems in the government, that said that we were not doing what we were supposed to be doing. They told us to just plant trees and not worry about what happens to the forest, what happens to the waters. And of course we could not do that because that's part of the second leg, the second pillar, of what I talked about. Sustainable management, good governance. Good governance means you have to hold your leaders accountable, and you cannot hold your leaders accountable if you do not know how these resources are managed. That is when the Greenbelt movement started being seen as a dangerous organization.

2) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote in Shura council and municipal elections. Not in the elections happening next week; no no no, in the next round of elections, the ones in 2015.

I've written before about the role of symbolic rights in felt political injustice, and I would argue that the right to vote for an "advisory" body in a monarchical system is something that is definitely symbolic, but also very meaningful. However, I'm also very skeptical. If you know anything about Kuwaiti politics, this move looks very familiar: it's reminiscent of the 1999 emiri decree, which I've argued elsewhere fell not because of misogyny pure and simple, but because of the attendant anti-democratic nature of the decree and its position in parliament/monarchy battles. (I've realized this conference paper isn't online anywhere, but if anyone wants a copy, let me know--it's currently in the article-shop-around phase.) It's worth noting that the time Kuwaiti women got voting rights, and it stuck, it was because of cooperation between legislative and monarchical forces, not because of a top-down imposition. Now, granted, the Saudi Shura council probably isn't strong enough to cancel out a royal decree (the Kuwaiti parliament has substantially stronger rights), but it would not surprise me even a tiny little bit if sometime in the next four years this right disappears.

In any case:

• Al Jazeera English article on the decree
• Global Voices roundup on it
• Two Jezebel articles here and here; I find it interesting to see how these events are framed for a Western feminist audience, and how the comment section/public discourse builds up.