This item is accessible only to the Washington University community.

Off-Campus WUSTL Users: Click the “Off-Campus Download” button below. You will be prompted to log in using your WUSTL Key.

Language

English (en)

Date of Award

3-1-2018

Author's School

College of Arts & Sciences

Author's Department

International and Area Studies

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)

Restricted/Unrestricted

Restricted

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the transformative potential of civil society discourse on women’s empowerment and political participation in Jordan. It asks how different civil society organizations approach empowerment and political participation in the context of the increasing securitization across the Middle East and the increasing significance of the refugee population in the Jordan after more than seven years of the Syrian conflict that have impacted Jordan’s politics, economy and society. Through a critical discourse analysis of ten organization’s websites and semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, this thesis argues that the international and national civil society organizations operating in Jordan working promote women’s political participation are fragmented in their approaches and empower women, in the transformative sense of the word, with varying degrees of success. The introduction of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security to Jordanian civil society through the re-drafting of a National Action Plan beginning in 2015 resulted in a shift in discourse on women’s political participation, focusing more on women’s participation in conflict resolution, in the security sector, and as refugees. Despite the transformative potential found in the theoretical implementation of the UNSCR 1325, discourse during the National Action Plan’s development revealed a silo effect, separating women’s political participation and gender equality as a whole from the Women, Peace and Security field.

Mentor

Trevor Sangrey

Comments

Accessibility Notice: This document is a scanned text that has been automatically processed using Python's Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine to provide a text alternative for assistive software. Formatting or character recognition discrepancies may exist.

Off-campus Download

Share

COinS