Muslim World Journal of Human Rights

Muslim World Journal of Human Rights Volume 7, Issue 2

2011

Article 1

Paradoxes of Democratic Progress in Kuwait: The Case of the Kuwaiti Women’s Rights Movement Doron Shultziner∗

∗ †

Mary Ann Tétreault†

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, [email protected] Trinity University, [email protected]

c Copyright 2011 Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.

Paradoxes of Democratic Progress in Kuwait: The Case of the Kuwaiti Women’s Rights Movement∗ Doron Shultziner and Mary Ann Tétreault

Abstract This paper analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage in Kuwait to determine how and why it was successful. The research highlights two paradoxical findings: first, democratic progress occurred despite the pacifying and hindering effects of modernization; second, it was supported more strongly and effectively by Kuwait’s autocratic executive than the democratically elected Kuwaiti parliament. We delineate two psychological factors that were connected to the climax of the struggle as they were experienced and acted upon by a relatively small number of Kuwaiti middleand upper-class women: transformative events and the tying of struggle goals to self-esteem. We examine these factors in the context of interaction between chaotic political circumstances and the new strategy and tactics that suffragists employed in the last phase of their struggle. The analytic approach involves process tracing, field research, interviews, and longitudinal analysis of primary and secondary sources. KEYWORDS: Kuwait, women’s rights, suffrage, Islam, social movements, self-esteem, elites, modernization

∗

Doron Shultziner would like to thank the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict for supporting the last phase of this research. Mary Ann Tétreault would like to acknowledge that research for this paper was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (grant 0527339), “AOC: Collaborative Research: The Dissent/Repression Nexus in the Middle East.

Shultziner and Tétreault: Paradoxes of Democratic Progress in Kuwait

For most of Kuwait’s history as an independent nation-state, Kuwaiti women could neither vote nor stand for election. Under the 1959 election law, passed before Kuwait’s first constitution was ratified in 1962, only Kuwaiti men were entitled to political rights. On May 16, 2005, forty-three years after a constitution that promised equal rights for all became Kuwait’s organic law, Kuwaiti women finally achieved full political rights by a majority vote of the Kuwaiti parliament. The first election featuring female candidates and voters was a municipal by-election held in April 2006. A month later, an unscheduled parliamentary election brought more than twenty female candidates to the hustings but, as occurred again two years later in yet another unscheduled election, none was victorious. In the third unscheduled parliamentary election in three years, which took place on the fourth anniversary of the passage of the women’s rights law, four women were elected to parliament on 16 May 2009. The achievement of political rights by Kuwaiti women is an example of democratic progress occurring in a non-democratic political system. Kuwait’s National Assembly is unique in the Gulf because it has a parliament with real power that is democratically elected.1 Even so, Kuwait does not qualify as a democracy under generally accepted standards: executive power remains vested in an autocratic ruling family, the Al Sabah, which twice suspended the constitution to rule illegally, by decree, during two multi-year periods. Yet democratic progress has occurred in Kuwait: constitutional life was restored following both illegal suspensions while the inclusion of women as full citizens has more than doubled the electorate to approximately 350,000 now eligible voters, more than half of them women, four of whom now sit in the National Assembly. Kuwait’s political structure has become more democratic under the criterion of suffrage even though it is not a democracy according to formalprocedural criteria. In this essay we address the questions of why the struggle for women’s suffrage came about and how and why it was successful. Analyzing how this recent development came about is an opportunity to examine the interaction of modernization, civil society, power struggles between autocratic ruling elites and elected parliaments, and the effectiveness of nonviolent protest in pursuit of broadening political and civil rights under difficult conditions. The analysis is 1

The National Assembly (Majlis al-Umma) is composed of fifty elected members plus the members of the Cabinet, who serve ex officio (article 80). Elections are normally held every four years, unless the Amir dissolves parliament before the end of the normal term (articles 83). The parliament has the power to declare an election invalid by a majority vote (article 95); vote a minister out of office (article 101); express no-confidence in the Prime Minister (article 102); reject laws proposed by the executive branch (article 66); and to raise and pass independent laws and regulations. In comparison, the new, twenty-first century municipal and national representative bodies in the Gulf are almost purely consultative, with the partial exception of those in Bahrain. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 7, Iss. 2 [2011], Art. 1

based on interviews with activists inside and outside Kuwait, on field research, public opinion polls, and on other primary and secondary materials. It uses process tracing to follow the causal chain of events during intense and contentious political periods.2 The paper proceeds as follows. We begin by sketching a general historical background. We then evaluate the effects of modernization in Kuwait, suggesting that the enfranchisement of women occurred not because of modernization but in spite of it. Following that, we explore other paradoxes of democratic progress such as the role of an unelected ruling elite in pushing forward a democratic reform opposed by a majority of an elected, and socially and politically representative parliament. We proceed by analyzing transformative events that introduced and shaped new cognitive frames for viewing woman suffrage among small groups of Kuwaiti women. These transformations, we argue, tied the goal of suffrage as a determinant of self-esteem among a group of middle- and upperclass activists. We continue by examining the reemergence of protest activity against women’s political exclusion and the tactics that achieved political rights for women after many previous failures. We also provide a detailed analysis of how Kuwaiti women managed to pressure the government to push through this constitutional reform despite strong opposition by Islamists and tribalists in the parliament. Finally, we draw theoretical lessons and conclusions from the Kuwaiti case with regard to the prospects for democracy in a society whose ideology, political institutions, and lifeways diverge sharply from its ideals and goals. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The women’s rights movement in Kuwait began in 1963 with the establishment of the first two women’s societies, the Arab Women Development Society (AWDS) and the Women’s Cultural and Social Society (WCSS). Their efforts to raise women’s rights issues were hampered by class conflicts and institutional rivalry. These conflicts ended in 1977 when the government dissolved the umbrella organization, the Kuwaiti Women’s Union, under which the AWDS, the WCSS, and a WCSS offshoot, Nadi al-Fatat, had operated. A year later, the government charged the AWDS with financial fraud, removed its founder and president, Nouria al-Sadani, and forced her into exile. The AWDS was taken over by a government-appointed official and was subsequently closed in 1980.3 With the AWDS dissolved, the WCSS and Nadi al-Fatat became the primary advocates of women’s rights during the 1980s. They had some success in 2

Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 3 Haya Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait: The Politics of Gender (London: Saqi Books, 2001). http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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pressing for women’s employment in state posts but their successes were limited by the Islamic revival sweeping Kuwait during the 1980s.4 Islamist groups were empowered by a bid by the new Amir, Jaber al-Ahmed (r. 1977-2006), to counter the popularity of Arab nationalism by identifying himself with traditional tribal and religious values.5 Galvanized by the success of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Kuwaiti Islamists sought to impose their version of traditional values in Kuwait. Sunni Islamists portrayed the women’s rights movement as against religion, a heresy, and an imperialist ploy. Kuwaiti suffragists remained on the defensive throughout the 1980s and failed to advance women’s political rights significantly. A new period of the women’s rights struggle began in 1991 after Kuwait was liberated from invasion and occupation by Iraq. Women argued that they had proven themselves by their contributions to the resistance throughout the brutal occupation, thereby earning full political rights. The government appeared to be more sympathetic to women’s rights after liberation but chose not to confront the strong alliance of Islamists, tribalists, and conservatives in parliament on the issue. On 16 May 1999, the Amir dissolved the fractious 1996 parliament and called for new elections in July, marking the first legal dissolution of the National Assembly. He appeared determined to use this brief opportunity to rule by decree to push a number of stalled projects forward. He issued sixty-three decrees, one of which entitled women to vote and stand for office. All but the decrees dealing with fiscal issues were later defeated by the National Assembly, which argued that they were unconstitutional because they were not matters of urgency or necessity. In a second vote, the women’s rights bill, which had been resubmitted by members of parliament to remove any taint of executive authoritarianism, was rejected again, this time by a margin of two votes. Subsequent attempts to pass women’s rights legislation were also thwarted until, six years after the Amir’s decree of 1999, the government forced the legislation through to passage. It is relatively clear how the women’s rights bill passed: the government was determined to avoid another humiliating defeat in parliament, and acted with uncharacteristic resolution to ensure that the bill would pass. Before the bill came to the floor, the government promoted it on national television, pressured and lobbied parliament, especially its loyalist members, and made sure that all government members were present for the vote. Liberal advocates of women’s rights such as Mohammad al-Sager, Head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, returned immediately to Kuwait following a meeting in Washington with Condoleezza Rice to vote for the bill. Meanwhile, the government began secretly 4

Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at pp. 138-42; Shafeeq Ghabra, “Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change,” The Middle East Journal 51 (1997): 368-369. 5 Mary Ann Tétreault and Haya al-Mughni, “Gender, Citizenship, and Nationalism in Kuwait,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1995): 64-80. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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to develop a new strategy for getting the measure through the parliament. The bill then under consideration, which had been amended to confine women’s participation only to voting and only in municipal elections, came up for its second reading on May 16, 2005. In a surprise move, the prime minister replaced it with one providing for full political rights. More importantly, he declared it to be “an act of urgency,” which does not require two separate votes in two different parliamentary sessions, enabling the bill to pass in one vote. The government also appears to have provided material incentives to tribalist members in exchange for their support.6 These included a promise to increase salaries for government employees and to raise pension payments.7 This was widely reported in the Kuwaiti media following a television appearance by Shaikh Mishel Al-Jarrah Al Sabah, a member of the ruling family and former head of National Security, who said that the government had paid fifty million dollars in bribes to women’s rights opponents.8 Afterward, amid rumors that he had been pressured to do so by family members, Mishel Al-Jarrah went back on what he had said although Kuwaitis we spoke to agreed that the government had “bought off” some parliament members to achieve women’s political rights.9 Despite the paucity of direct evidence, there are grounds to suspect that the government had indeed bought the vote. For example, although just two weeks earlier a majority of members would not even discuss a bill on women’s participation in any capacity in national elections, last-minute behind-the-scenes maneuvers were so intense that on 16 May the substitute bill granting full political rights passed comfortably, thirty five in favor and twenty three against, much to the surprise of most observers, female and male.10

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See also Mary Ann Tétreault, Katherine Meyer, and Helen Rizzo, “Women’s Rights in the Middle East: A Longitudinal Study of Kuwait,” International Political Sociology 3(2009): 218-37. 7 Diana Elias, “Kuwait gives women vote, but with limits,” The Associated Press, 17 May 2005. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05137/505504.stm (Accessed January 15, 2011); Gökhan Bacik, Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East: The Cases of Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 103. 8 See the highly circumspect editorial in the Kuwaiti daily Arab Times (posted online on 19 May 2005) compiled by its staff three days after passage: “However, some people who opposed the bill to grant the Kuwaiti women their political rights were heard calling the vote clandestine political deals said to have been concluded between the government and the MPs in a bid to pass the Kuwaiti women’s suffrage” (original English phrasing; editorial no longer available online). 9 Shultziner interviews, August 2006; Tétreault interviews, March 2006. 10 After debating for nine hours, the opposition did manage to attach an amendment saying that “Women must adhere to the rules and provisions of the Islamic law (Shari’a) when it comes to voting and candidacy” (Omar Hasan, AFP, 17 May 2005). One result is that women and men vote at separate polling stations, a boon for analysts interested in analyzing the impact of sex on voting decisions. A less benign outcome is growing pressure for sex-segregation of campaign events. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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MODERNIZATION AND COUNTER-DEMOCRATIC EFFECTS Modernization theory would appear at first glance to offer a likely explanation of democratic progress in Kuwait thanks to the effects of five decades of rapid economic growth. According to modernization theory, economic growth expands the range of human needs while it forges structural changes conducive to democratic change.11 In Kuwait, however, women’s social and political exclusion did not decrease due to modernization, but rather was translated into different forms. In some respects, we argue, modernization actually hindered democratic progress by eliciting a strong backlash from equally empowered conservative forces. Kuwait experienced significant economic and social change following the discovery of oil in 1938 and the rapid development of production and exports following World War II. Oil revenues that started from a modest $760,000 USD in 1948 rose to a projected $77.74 billion in fiscal 2008.12 Oil income financed an extensive welfare state providing citizens with health care, housing grants, and utilities, along with compulsory education for girls and boys – all tax-free.13 Foreign labor increased Kuwaitis’ material well-being at the same time that modernization increased social mobility and created a large middle class. Yet modernization also sparked tensions and discontents.14 With regard to gender, “the education of women and, even more so, their employment outside the home threatened the dominance of fathers and husbands over the women of their families.”15 Modernization subverted the tradition of physical confinement of women to their homes while women’s independence was enhanced by the widespread ownership and use of cars.16 Women also have proven to be formidable competitors: a larger proportion of women than men graduate from university, and they have moved into high positions in the private and public sectors. 11

Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53(1959): 69-105; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12 “Kuwait's oil revenue up 44 percent in 2008”, 10 May 2009, Reuters. 13 Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at p. 32. 14 Bacik, Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East, supra note 7; Ghabra, Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change, supra note 4; Anh Nga Longva, “Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens, Expatriates and the Socio-Political System in Kuwait,” in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, eds., Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). 15 Mary Ann Tétreault and Haya al-Mughni, “Modernization and its Discontents: State and Gender in Kuwait,” The Middle East Journal 49(1995), p. 406. 16 Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait (Publisher Boulder, Colo.; Oxford: Westview, 1997), pp. 193-196. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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In this context, it is striking that women and men made so few demands for democracy in Kuwait. Modernization did not erode men’s and women’s primary loyalties to their families and tribes because both of these patriarchal structures continued to be the main source of their social status and privileges. Members of women’s organizations, most – with the significant exception of the now-defunct AWDS – dominated by women from the merchant class, have been particularly cautious not to push their demands too far lest they lose their authority to represent Kuwait in international fora.17 Some expressed a pervasive fear of change in Kuwaiti society,18 including the enfranchisement of women, which they saw as too far-reaching. In this sense, Kuwait has not differed significantly in its responses to modernization from other Middle Eastern societies in which demands for women’s rights are perceived as signs of moral decay.19 Arguments for women’s political rights couched in the language of human rights were often seen as threatening and resulted in more opposition than support by Kuwaiti women: conservative women also organized to curtail suffragist campaigns, for example, by collecting hundreds of signatures on petitions opposing women’s suffrage.20 Another negative effect of modernization on democratization points to its pacifying effects. The Kuwaiti government used its monopoly over immense oil revenues to “buy out” the political power of the merchant elite. “The merchant class withdrew from politics in exchange for guarantees of its economic position and promises of more wealth from the oil revenues.”21 Jill Crystal finds the roots of this social contract between rulers and merchants extending back to the 1950s.22 Although this pact has been breached by both sides since then, its effects persist in consequence of the domination of electoral politics in Kuwait by rising numbers of citizens enjoying far less autonomy than members of merchant families. The extensive welfare benefits that the government confers on Kuwaiti citizens constitute a pacifier justifying and legitimizing the non-democratic 17

A leader of the WCSS even went as far as to deny in an international setting that “Kuwaiti women have ever been oppressed or subject to discriminatory practices” quoted in al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at p. 142. 18 Longva, Walls Built on Sand, supra note 16; Longva, Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy, supra note 14. 19 Fatima Mernissi, “Democracy as Moral Disintegration: The Contradiction between Religious Belief and Citizenship as a Manifestation of the Ahistoricity of the Arab Identity,” in Women of the Arab World: The Coming Challenge, ed., Nahid Toubia (London: Zed Books, 1988), pp. 3544. 20 Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3; Longva, Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy, supra 14. 21 Helen Mary Rizzo, Islam, Democracy and the Status of Women: The Case of Kuwait (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 13. 22 Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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system.23 Oil revenues make the government economically independent from the population and provide resources allowing Kuwaiti rulers and others to manipulate elections by financing candidates and buying votes.24 The absence of taxation coupled with huge social benefits defines the rentier nature of the Kuwaiti political system and the self-conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement such a system engenders.25 A third negative effect of modernization on demands for democratic change lies in the massive foreign workforce. Anh Nga Longva argues that gender and class differences among Kuwaitis are amplified by the huge social distance between Kuwaitis and foreign workers.26 About one million Kuwaiti citizens live amongst about two million non-Kuwaitis, producing a ‘siege mentality’27 reflected not only in negative or hostile attitudes towards change but also in a psychological need to preserve identity and tradition by a minority in their own country. Yet the foreign workforce also lifts all Kuwaitis to a higher standard of living and a position of power over the working class. Women enjoy improvements in their lives thanks to cheap domestic labor: nearly every Kuwaiti household employs one maid or more, allowing Kuwaiti women leisure and the opportunity to work outside the home.28 Longva argues that their relative privilege “helps convince Kuwaitis that there is more to gain in accepting the status quo than in trying to challenge it.”29 Finally, there is scant indication that modernization forged structural prerequisites of democratic progress. The first women’s organizations were formed in 1963, and resistance to women’s exclusion did not result from modernization-related structural developments, which rather served to intensify class antagonism and confine women’s public role to the status of supporters of 23

Peter Berkowitz also comments that many Kuwaiti students were apathetic to the absence of women’s suffrage in Kuwait and some female students stated that they already have all their important rights. Interview by Shultziner with Peter Berkowitz, August 21, 2006, Hoover Institution, Washington DC. See also Peter Berkowitz, “They’ve Kuwaited Long Enough: What’s stopping Kuwait’s women from voting?” The Weekly Standard May 4, 2005; Peter Berkowitz, “An Oasis: Kuwaiti Women Make Progress,” National Review March 3, 2004. 24 Tétreault Mary Ann, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 61, 123. 25 Bacik, Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East, supra note 7. 26 Longva, Walls Built on Sand, supra note 16; Longva, Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy, supra note 14. 27 For the concept of siege mentality see Daniel Bar-Tal and Dikla Antebi, “Siege Mentality in Israel,” Ongoing Production on Social Representation 1(1992): 49-67. 28 On the conditions of domestic workers in Kuwait and their mistreatment by Kuwaiti women and men alike see the report Walls at Every Turn: Abuse of Migrant Domestic Workers through Kuwait’s Sponsorship System (Human Rights Watch, October 2010; available online: http://www.hrw.org). 29 Longva, Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy, supra note 14 at p. 130. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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male-dominated institutions.30 Rather, the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91, and the Amir’s decision to support women’s rights publicly in 1999 (see below) modified social structures and fostered new ideological orientations toward women’s rights. These events were independent of economic development per se. In fact, before the election in May 2009 there was widespread displeasure and discontent with the National Assembly, the only democratically elected body in Kuwait, due to acute political conflicts between the ruling elite and parliament members and also because of the Amir’s strategy of calling repeated elections that resulted in no apparent positive change.31 In sum, modernization reproduced and reinforced traditional structures of patriarchy and tribalism, a tendency especially salient regarding women’s rights. A significant and widespread effect of modernization on Kuwaiti society was to evoke a desire to “return to traditional ways of life” that was fueled by an Islamist revival incorporating particularly hostile political attitudes toward women’s rights. Modernization may have changed women’s roles and their access to education, but it did not alter a generally submissive state of mind. Women’s exclusion was merely refurbished for modern and affluent times. PARADOXES OF ELITE VERSUS OPPOSITION A long history of conflicts of interests between the Al Sabah and the merchant elites continued after Kuwait became independent from Britain in 1961. They are reflected in ongoing power struggles between the ruling family and a parliament that represents the interests of various economic elites and large population segments in contemporary Kuwait.32 The enfranchisement of women became a primary arena for this conflict33 whose dynamics produced political reform in which an unelected ruling elite could claim the mantel of democracy while an elected parliament could be cast as an institution bent on denying political rights to half the adult population. 30

Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3. Mary Ann Tétreault and Mohammed Al-Ghanim, “The Day After Victory: Kuwait’s 2009 Election and the Contentious Present,” Middle East Report Online, July 8, 2009. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero070809.html (accessed January 15, 2011). 32 Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, supra note 22; al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at pp. 174-175; Ghabra, Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change, supra note 4 at pp. 364-366; Tétreault, Stories of Democracy, supra note 24 at pp. 218-219; Al-Najjar, Ghanim, “Kuwait: Struggle over Parliament,” Arab Reform Bulletin 4(5), June 2006. 33 Haya Al-Mughni, “The Politics of Women’s Suffrage in Kuwait,” Arab Reform Bulletin 4(2004); Tétreault, Stories of Democracy, supra note 24; Mary Ann Tétreault, “A State of Two Minds: State Cultures, Women, and Politics in Kuwait,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33(2001): 203-20; Mary Ann Tétreault, “Kuwait’s Parliament Considers Women's Political Rights, Again,” Middle East Report Online, 2 September 2004 (accessed January 15, 2011). 31

http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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Opposition to the enfranchisement of Kuwaiti women since the 1980s consisted mainly of Islamists, tribalists, and social conservatives. After the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the ruling elite became more openly supportive of women’s right to vote amidst the growing influence of anti-women’s-rights groups which also opposed policies such as economic privatization that were favored by the regime. A high point in this struggle occurred in 1999 when a women’s rights measure was bundled into the package of decrees issued by the Amir during the parliamentary interregnum between his dissolution of the body and the election of its successor two months later. All except budget measures were defeated by the new parliament and the women’s rights bill was defeated again twice by what some saw as a more liberal parliament than the one it replaced. Its successor also opposed women’s rights legislation. The opposition of parliamentary majorities to women’s rights was not confined to politics but also extended to education and the workplace. For example, in 1996 during the last days of the 1992 parliament, it imposed gender segregation on universities in Kuwait. Earlier, it had lowered the age at which women could retire with full benefits. In 2003, the frail but popular Amir requested the parliament to respect his wish to grant women the right to vote. The conservative parliamentarians conceded that he was worthy of respect but denied that refusing to grant suffrage to women was a sign of disrespect to him. When women received their first cabinet appointments, parliamentary Islamists spearheaded a successful effort to remove one of them, Masouma Mubarak, and threatened to remove the female education minister, Nuriya al-Sabeeh, who kept her position by promising to extend and enforce vigorously the 1996 sex-segregation law.34 Even after women won their political rights, efforts to deface and destroy the campaign materials and infrastructure of female candidates were evident in parliamentary campaigns.35 This overall phenomenon attests to a deficit in democratic norms among many Kuwaiti citizens who consistently return Islamist, tribalist, and socially regressive members to parliament who run on strongly patriarchal and antiwomen’s rights platforms. This is not to say that there are no liberal and prowomen’s rights Kuwaiti parliamentarians or that the ruling elite really is the bearer of democratic reforms in Kuwait.36 Indeed, there is a liberal minority in parliament and, as will be discussed below, the ruling elite did not volunteer to confront the Islamist opposition but was rather pushed, even forced, to pass the 34

Mary Ann Tétreault, “Bottom-up Democratization in Kuwait,” in Political Change in the Arab States: Stuck in Transition, ed. Mary Ann Tétreault, Gwenn Okruhlik, and Andrzej Kapiszewski (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2011), p. 87. 35 Mary Ann Tétreault, “Kuwait’s Annus Mirabilis,” Middle East Report Online September 7, 2006. (accessed January 15, 2011). 36 Mohammed Al-Ghanim, “‘Transitions to Nowhere?’ Kuwait and the Challenge of Political Liberalization,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, November 15, 2010. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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woman suffrage bill. Yet these dynamics do show the complexities and obstacles to democratic progress when it is not supported by broad-based democratic culture and values. These factors sometimes hinder democratic progress even when structural and material conditions appear favorable. POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS Given the complexities and paradoxes of democratic progress in Kuwait, questions then arise as to how this important reform was achieved and whether general conclusions can be drawn from it. We begin our account by highlighting psychological factors involved in the emergence of the women’s struggle for political rights, including transformative events that impinged in various ways on the political process, and the entanglement of activist self-esteem with the struggle itself. DEVELOPMENTS IN THE IDEA OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN KUWAIT Throughout most of Kuwaiti history, the idea that women are entitled to the same political rights as men was considered marginal, even radical. Yet changes in attitudes and orientations towards women’s political rights did occur and exerted an impact on the political process. The story of Nouria al-Saddani is symbolic of the ideological transformations that Kuwaiti society underwent. When Nouria used the Arab Women’s Development Society in 1963 to advocate equal rights for women, she was way ahead of her time. Her work to liberate women through education was alien and alienating to many Kuwaiti men and women, such as the following statement: How painful and depressing it is for us to see half the community stagnating in the house under the pressure of stone-hard minds greatly damaged by the effects of time, circumstances, customs and traditions, and as a result having not a glimpse of enlightenment.37 In 1971, Nouria presented the government with the first petition calling for full political rights for women only to be met with hostility from the establishment and many conservatives. Most Kuwaitis believed that women gain respect and dignity by adhering to their traditional roles as mothers and wives. This view was entrenched in power structures in which women were confined spatially and socially, and subordinated to their fathers and brothers. The 37

Quoted in al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at p. 78.


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introduction of women into the political sphere was perceived as undignified and threatening, especially by men for whom politics was the last bastion of masculine dominance, but it also was resisted by many women. Political rights were widely perceived as irrelevant to women’s “true” concerns. An important departure from these cognitive frames occurred after the second Gulf War (1990-91). During the war, “Kuwaiti women joined the underground armed resistance and sacrificed their lives for the survival of their community. This had [a] far reaching impact on women’s gender consciousness and activism,”38 destabilizing established cognitive maps according to which women were protected by men. The war reversed that reality as Kuwait City became a “city of women,” with many men in hiding, dependent on women for the necessities of life, while women struggled against Iraqi occupying forces. The war revealed the emptiness of patriarchal rhetoric ascribing to women an essentially different human nature unsuitable to politics. Women mounted the first demonstration against the occupation, and suffered the first casualties of the resistance.39 Women’s activities against the Iraqi occupation at home and abroad opened a new political consciousness and assertiveness regarding women’s rights. The second Gulf War was simultaneously a destabilizing and a liberating experience, a ‘transformative event’40 that contributed to the first sharp departure from previous cognitive frames. On the one hand, many women began seeing their political exclusion as unjust and demeaning. On the other hand, the Islamist camp was strengthened by popular memories of the role of mosques during the war and rising religiosity following liberation.41 Moreover, returning exiles and Islamist groups were rewriting and retelling the history of the war, disparaging the heroism of women and appropriating the victory to themselves.42 Even so, although Kuwait was more polarized ideologically on the question of women’s 38

Ibid, p. 151. Ibid, p. 153. 40 The concept of transformative events was coined by McAdam and Sewell who note that “the key feature of transformative events is that they come to be interpreted as significantly disrupting, altering, or violating the taken-for-granted assumptions governing routine political and social relations” Doug McAdam and William H. Sewell Jr., “It’s About Time: Temporality in the Study of Social Movements and Revolutions,” in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, ed. Ronald R. Aminzade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 112 – original emphasis; see also Aldon D. Morris, “Charting Futures for Sociology: Social Organization,” Contemporary Sociology 29(2000), p. 452. 41 Haya Al-Mughni and Mary Ann Tétreault, “Political Actors without the Franchise: Women and Politics in Kuwait,” in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, eds., Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at pp. 151-163. 42 Tétreault, Stories of Democracy, supra note 24 at pp. 93-94; Mary Ann Tétreault, “Divided Communities of Memory: Diasporas Come Home,” in Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture, and Identity, ed. Haideh Moghissi (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 81-98. 39

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rights after the war than it had been before, a larger proportion of citizens had shifted their position toward perceiving women’s claims as legitimate. A common post-war trope was that women had proven themselves in wartime and hence had earned political rights. Members of the Al Sabah publicly recognized women’s contributions to the resistance and implied to suffragists that the government would push the issue. There is no evidence that this occurred but post-war political parlance did change such that women’s rights moved closer to mainstream public opinion, a change both reflected in, and spread through, the media. Surveys in Kuwait during the 1990s show a complex picture of changes in public opinion regarding women’s rights.43 Public opinion on suffrage fluctuated between 1994 and 1998, reflecting a backlash against women’s rights in 1996. Those regularly exposed to local and international media were more favorable towards women’s rights. Support for women’s suffrage came from different social groups and was not narrowly sectarian. By the end of the 1990s, more Kuwaitis were framing women’s exclusion as morally problematic or unjust, creating an environment open to the message of the Amir’s 1999 decree to confer full political rights on women.44 Finally, during the 1990s, ideological beliefs that women’s political rights contravened Islam were being challenged on religious grounds. Moderate Shi’i women and men began advocating universal suffrage in the 1990s, arguing that granting the vote to women is compatible with the Quran and Shari’a. In 1999, Shaikh Jabir al Ahmad issued his decree on women’s political rights “in recognition of [women’s] vital roles in building Kuwaiti society and in return for the sacrifices they have made during various challenges the country faced.”45 The Amir’s decree boosted the legitimacy of rights advocates: theirs became the official mainstream position while the Islamist stand looked radical and recalcitrant. International attention to Islamist rejection of women’s rights was an embarrassment to the image of Kuwait in the West. The Amir’s decree of 1999 could be seen as the product of pressure at home and abroad.46 The 1999 decree itself became a transformative event. It was the first time the Amir had formally acknowledged his support of women’s political rights and attempted to 43

Katherine Meyer, Helen Rizzo, and Yousef Ali,. “Changed Political Attitudes in the Middle East,” International Sociology 22(2007): 289-324; Katherine Meyer, Helen Rizzo, and Yousef Ali, “Changing sources of support for women’s political rights,” International Social Science Journal 57(2005): 207-218; Rizzo Islam, Democracy and the Status of Women, supra note 21; Helen Rizzo, Katharine Meyer, and Yousef Ali, “Women’s Political Rights: Islam, Status and Networks in Kuwait,” Sociology 36(2002): 639-662. 44 Ghanim Al-Najjar, “The Challenges Facing Kuwaiti Democracy,” Middle East Journal 54(2000), p. 255; Meyer, Changing sources of support for women’s political rights. 45 Quoted in al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at p. 172. 46 Steve Yetiv, “Kuwait’s Democratic Experiment in its Broader International Context,” The Middle East Journal 56(2002): 257-271. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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back it up with legislation. The razor-thin defeat of the parliamentary version of his proposal in November 1999 intensified the memory of this event. In response, activists dropped the argument that women had earned their rights. Instead, they argued that, according to the constitution, these rights were theirs as Kuwaitis. The WCSS formed its Committee on the Political Rights of Women two weeks later in direct response to the Amir’s decree. Moderate Sunni groups, Shiì groups, and women’s groups (the FKWA) aligned themselves with the WCSS, and new pro-suffragist groups joined the movement.47 To appreciate how much the cognitive maps relocating women’s political exclusion from beyond to within the pale of legitimacy had changed, it is interesting to note that Nouria alSaddani, exiled for her women’s rights activism in 1978, was honored for that same activism with a national award in December 2004. Nevertheless, one should not overestimate the extent of these cognitive changes and their causal importance for the passing of the women’s rights bill. First, despite shifting opinion among some Kuwaitis, many others, including many women, still held conservative opinions about women’s rights. Second, no mass mobilization occurred until 2005. Third, even after Kuwaiti women were enfranchised they failed to vote heavily for female candidates in three subsequent local and national elections. Finally, these developments, as important as they were, were not enough by themselves to compel the government to apply its full power to achieve women’s political rights. These cognitive shifts enabled new opportunities for the struggle but in order to make suffrage for Kuwaiti women a reality, pressure by women activists had to be applied, as will be discussed below. SUFFRAGE AS A DETERMINANT OF SELF-ESTEEM One important result of the changes described in the previous section is that the attainment of suffrage had become a major determinant of self-esteem among a group of women from the upper echelons of Kuwaiti society. Achieving the right to vote had turned from an issue which did not affect these women’s overall evaluation of themselves to one that affected positive and negative cognitive appraisals and accompanying emotions.48 Being denied political rights had 47

Al-Mughni and Tétreault, Political Actors without the Franchise, supra note 41; al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at p. 181. Another important event that probably assisted this process is the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. Abdulwahab Alkebsi then with the National Endowment for Democracy, and Shafeeq Ghabra then with the American University of Kuwait, both argued that the 9/11 events provoked a discussion about identity among Kuwaitis (“who are we?”) that strengthened pro-democratic ideals and eroded the validity of the old excuses for denying women their political rights. Interviews by Shultziner, November 2006 and October 2007. 48 For an introduction to the literature on self-esteem and behavior see Albert Bandura, “SelfEfficacy Mechanism in Human Agency,” American Psychologist 37 (1982): 122-47; Jennifer Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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become highly important in their emotional lives, which they expressed in the language of recognition in such terms as “basic citizenship,” “basic respect and recognition,” and “human dignity.”49 The pursuit of suffrage for these women had become entangled with self-esteem: struggling for the vote was both an effort to defend a positive self-image and to reject one that signified complicity in their own oppression. This psychological dimension is revealed by a discourse analysis of activists’ testimonies and from interviews. In interviews conducted by Helen Rizzo, many Kuwaiti women testified that their disenfranchisement made them feel like “second-class citizens”50: the lack of political rights offended their sense of dignity or self-worth. In interviews conducted over a twenty-year period since the 1990s in Kuwait, Mary Ann Tétreault found that the issue of dignity existed across the board among women in the women’s rights movement, and that it was consciously expressed. Women often evoked the terminology of oppression despite the fact that many were from upper-class families and occupied prestigious positions. The main motivation of female activists was associated with sentiments of being treated as inferior citizens deprived of taking an equal part in making decisions that affected their own lives. For example, Ma`souma Abdullah, explained the ultimate goal behind the protest activity of attempting to register to vote in February 2002: “We wanted it as a symbolic gesture [...] a sort of a reminder to Kuwait that women insist on their political rights.”51 In demonstrations in spring 2005, participants carried posters and wore T-shirts that said “Women are Kuwaitis too.” After the suffrage bill passed, Maha Barjes, a member of Kuwait’s Human Rights Society, said, “I feel like I am a full citizen today.”52 These examples suggest that the group of women activists perceived the denial of political rights as threatening and a hindrance to their sense of selfesteem. Rola Dashti, a prominent leader in the Kuwaiti women’s rights movement, is a striking example of the importance of recognition as an emotional impetus to Crocker and Noah Nuer, “The Insatiable Quest for Self-Worth,” Psychological Inquiry 14(2004): 31-4; Michael Kernis, “Towards a Conceptualization of Optimal Self-Esteem.” Psychological Inquiry 14(2003): 1-26; Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, Solomon Sheldon, Jamie Arndt, and Jeff Schimel, “Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and Empirical Review,” Psychological Bulletin 130(2004): 435-68. 49 For a fuller discussion on the language of recognition, self-esteem, and social movements see Doron Shultziner, Struggling for Recognition: The Psychological Impetus for Democratic Progress (New York: Continuum, 2010). 50 Rizzo, Islam, Democracy and the Status of Women, supra note 21; Shultziner interview, September 2006. 51 Quoted in Tétreault et al., Women’s Rights in the Middle East, supra note 6 at p. 213 (emphasis added). 52 Quoted in Hassan M. Fattah, “Kuwaiti women Join the Voting After a Long Battle for Suffrage,” The New York Times, June 30, 2006. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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the women’s struggle. Like many Kuwaitis with graduate degrees, Rola studied in the United States, where she earned her Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University. She returned to Kuwait in 1992 determined to fight for political change and for women’s political rights in particular. Rola pursued her goal before the Court of Cassation, by organizing resistance activity, using the media, and lobbying the ruling elite. “As a citizen who had ambitions to participate in the development of a nation, I just felt like a number, a statistic,” she said. “This is how it all started. I just wanted to have a voice.”53 Five days after women got the vote, Rola talked about her experiences and feelings during the long campaign for women’s political rights. She recounted a moment in 2002 watching the joy and pride of a seven-year-old girl helping her mother vote in an election in Washington DC. “At that moment” she said, “I promised myself that whatever it takes we shouldn’t stop our struggle and fight for women’s suffrage in Kuwait.”54 Rola also talks about psychological terrorism inflicted on Kuwaiti women by Islamist extremists, and about her motivation to resist it: “We believed in Kuwait. We had the determination, will and hope, and more importantly, we refused that Islamist extremists and terrorists control our life and our dignity.”55 Rola’s motivations and sentiments are key to understanding the success of the movement for women’s political rights because her actions contributed significantly to that achievement, as will be discussed in detail in the next section. THE RE-EMERGENCE OF CIVIC PRESSURES ON THE RULING ELITE The psychological factors that were noted above eventually affected political action among a small number of Kuwaiti women who would spearhead the struggle for suffrage. The struggle was long and grew more sophisticated as the suffragists learned from their failures and became more politically educated, and also connected to various organizations within and outside Kuwait. The Gulf War in 1990-91 and the Amir’s decree of 1999 provided encouraging cues that increased the prospects for successful action among those who already had internalized the equation of injustice and women’s political exclusion. The heightened motivation to bring about political change among the early suffragists increased the scope of their activity during the 1990s, and is 53

Quoted in Hannah Allam, “Confronting Tradition: Candidate spurred change that allowed Kuwaiti women to vote for the first time,” Women, June 29, 2006 (emphases added). 54 Rola Dashti, “Twentieth Anniversary Soref Symposium: Assessing the Winds of Change, Soref Symposium,” The Washington Institute, 2005, date May 21, 2005. < http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=272> (accessed January 15, 2011) 55 Ibid; see also Rola Dashti, “Can there be democracy with marginalization?” Bitterlemons.org 28(2005), (accessed January 15, 2011). Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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reflected in the post-war orientation of the WCSS. For a brief period, the WCSS sheltered an unlicensed group seeking rights for Kuwaiti women married to nonKuwaitis, and also embarked on a more assertive program of its own.56 The WCSS was, like all licensed voluntary organizations in Kuwait, a governmentfunded and regulated organization. In addition, it had been monopolized by a closed circle of upper-class, politically “safe” women suspicious of and unwelcoming to new members.57 Its new agenda was made possible by structural changes including a change in leadership. In response, the government established an alternative women’s organization, the Federation of Kuwaiti Women’s Association (FKWA). An umbrella group heavily weighted toward Sunni Islamists and chaired by the wife of the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, FKWA replaced the WCSS as the public face representing “Kuwaiti women” in official international settings on women’s rights such as the Beijing Conference in 1995. The WCSS both lost its former privileged status and found itself competing for resources against Islamist women’s groups. Seeking a way out of its political isolation, it aligned with liberal-democratic groups, international organizations, and other Kuwaiti associations which supported women’s rights. In the process, the WCSS learned “the skills of negotiating, lobbying, leadership and coalition building”58, emerging from isolation a stronger advocate of women’s rights, although on the conservative side of the feminist spectrum. Organized protest burgeoned, especially after the 1992 parliament passed a law imposing gender segregation at Kuwait University in 1996. Awarenessraising campaigns included intensive utilization of media, arranging conferences and debates, staging rallies, sits-ins, and marches, putting women’s names on candidates’ lists, organizing petitions, and taking cases to the courts.59 Women lobbied prominent members of the Al Sabah in particular. These activities took place on a small scale, rarely involving more than a hundred women and even fewer men; until 2005, they were more symbolic than effective. Changes in organizational activity reflected motivational changes arising from transformative events. In such contexts, social movement organizations themselves are generated and strengthened, but not all sources of contention are movement organizations and not all pressures are channeled through them. An example is the lobbying by upper-class women working outside Kuwait. A sense of deprivation had developed among Kuwaiti expatriate women experiencing and witnessing foreign life-ways and internalizing new social comparisons (see for 56

Interviews in Kuwait by Tétreault 1992 and 1994. Al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait, supra note 3 at pp. 165-167. 58 Ibid, p. 167. 59 Ibid, pp. 180-183; see also WCSS publication, “The Women’s Cultural & Social Society, 19632003… Endless Giving.” 57


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example Rola Dashti’s account above). Others had similar experiences abroad, while activists inside Kuwait met, and were invigorated by, visiting representatives of international women’s organizations, academics, and other foreigners working on women’s issues. Embarrassed by inquiries from Western interlocutors about their lack of political rights, Kuwaiti women abroad grew increasingly angry at their political exclusion. Many were on diplomatic assignments at consulates60 and others were delegates to international conferences. They communicated directly with government officials in their various capacities as partners or government employees and their dissatisfaction translated into direct individual and informal pressures on the government, as the following statement by Mohammad al-Sager, Head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, demonstrates: We should also talk about the embarrassment that the Kuwaiti delegations feel when they participate in the international parliamentarian conferences, and how they are often bombarded with questions of how Kuwait is denying the identities of some of its citizens. How come Kuwait is not granting women their political rights, which is considered a basic human rights issue? Those who say we respect and revere women as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters but advocate for them to stay at home should know that such statements are unacceptable because the civilized world would not accept such a point of view.61 Instances of individual complaints having an impact on policy making may appear alien in conjunction with concepts like movement organization, network, and opportunity.62 Yet the example here reflects a relative independence from social organizations. These actions were spontaneous, independent, and informal. Few were identified with any specific organization but they had a cumulative, unplanned effect on the Al Sabah elite. It is difficult to conceptualize these individual behaviors as organized resistance, yet they were important. Beyond such spontaneous pressure on power holders and the general activities of the women’s organizations, more specific tactics were involved in bringing about democratic progress in 2005. 60

For example, an anonymous interviewee recalled that the wife of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington D.C. said it was difficult to represent Kuwait without having the right to vote. 61 Mohammad al-Sager, Head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, speech delivered in the Kuwaiti Parliament, May 16 2005 (transcript and video were produced and distributed by the Kuwaiti Information Office, Washington DC). 62 A recent exception is Jutta M. Joachim, Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2007). Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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NONVIOLENT ACTION AND TACTICS The timing of the enfranchisement of Kuwaiti women was a result of a long learning process combined with random political circumstances. In this process, a small group of Kuwaiti women better understood the political game and the balance of power among various actors, and brought effective pressure to bear on the relevant power holders. The learning process involved devising a new strategy and new tactics. Whereas previously women had relied on the good will and declared intentions of the ruling elite which they presumed would work through appointed government ministers to pass the women’s rights bill, this strategy changed in 2005. Women activists also moved from a defensive, formalistic, and passive mode, to an offensive, active, and collective action mode in the last and decisive phase of the campaign.63 The first tactic was to frame the struggle for women’s rights differently. After liberation, women argued that they had earned political rights. Later, their tactics shifted to pursuing women’s rights in court. Activists concluded that the first tactic had framed women as competitors to “religion” within and against the mosque as a remembered haven during the occupation, while the second depended on courts unwilling to entertain constitutional-moral arguments. By 2005, activists had shifted into nationalist discourse, framing and equating women’s rights with development and a bright future for Kuwait. Women’s political rights were presented to the public as essential to the future of Kuwaiti children, national security, improving education, and to making progress toward a better future. Their opponents were attacked as anti-national, anti-progress, closed-minded people – as extremists. Within this framing, Islamists were on the defensive, forced to explain why they opposed national goals such as democracy, progress, and development, all important to Kuwaitis. Women’s rights were thereby redefined as everyone’s issue, a national issue, and not just a women’s issue.64 Since 2005, the developmental issues (especially economic and educational) and ‘better future for Kuwait’ remain the main frames for women political activists and parliament members in pursuing political agenda. That is why thousands of proud Kuwaitis attended a rally in 2005 in front of the parliament building in one of the largest demonstrations ever held in Kuwait City. It was an exceptional event for the women’s rights movement. Mobilization based on earlier frames had drawn smaller crowds of mostly adult 63

Information about this stage comes from interviews with Kuwaiti officials and activists, as well as the press. We omit names and other identifying details to protect the anonymity of the interviewees. 64 This framing tactic is similar to those employed in a regional campaign for Arab Women’s Rights for Nationality by the organization Claiming Equal Citizenship (see also http://www.learningpartnership.org/citizenship/). We thank Alexandra Pittman for this point. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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women. The 2005 demonstrators represented all of Kuwait: teens, university students, young, middle-aged and elderly adults, women – veiled and unveiled – and ordinary Kuwaiti men. The size and scope of the gathering, and its high visibility in real time and in the media made it a landmark event. In opportunityframing language, Kuwaiti women managed to “rally activists and allies behind the master frame in the face of competition from other social actors” by using irrefutable tactical frames.65 The second new mobilization tactic was text-messaging to young activists. As Steve Coll reported, “Kuwaiti women organizing protests for voting rights said that they had been more effective during their 2005 campaign than during their last serious effort five years ago because text messaging had allowed them to call young protestors out of schools and into the streets.”66 Indeed, a major source of support to the women’s campaign for the vote came from the generation of Kuwaitis reared in the digital era. They are less intimidated by official and unofficial censorship in Kuwait and are used to speaking their minds in email messages, Internet blogs, and text-messages. Young Kuwaitis are impatient with widespread corruption in government ranks and also resent elements of the older generation they see as blocking their way.67 A generational consciousness gap separates youth from those who accept traditional forms of exclusionary politics. In fact, a spontaneous movement spearheaded by recent university graduates brought down the Kuwaiti government in May 2006 when a few weeks of demonstrations promoting redistricting triggered a political crisis.68 Many of these young activists had had their first taste of participatory politics in the women’s rights movement Activists also administered existing means of pressures more effectively. They were more skillful in their use of media, releasing statements to the local press to influence public opinion and pressure the government. Press releases by the Kuwait Economists’ Society, chaired by Rola Dashti, were influential because of the status of the organization and the boldness of the language. Activists also used international media to pressure the ruling elite. The BBC, along with other international news organizations, was in close contact with female activists during the struggle. The movement took advantage of the natural interest of overseas audiences in the drama to press their points further. 65

David Levin, “Framing peace policies: The competition for resonant themes,” Political Communication 22 (2005), p. 85; Francesca Polletta and Kai Ho, “Frames and their Consequences,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds., Robert. E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 66 Steve Coll, “In the Gulf, Dissidence Goes Digital,” The Washington Post, March 29, 2005. 67 Ghabra, Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change, supra note 4. 68 Al-Najja, The Challenges Facing Kuwaiti Democracy, supra note 44; Tétreault Kuwait’s Annus Mirabilis, supra note 35. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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These pressures touched a sensitive foreign-policy nerve. During and after the Iraqi occupation, Kuwaiti rulers appreciated the strategic importance of maintaining and strengthening support from the United States and other Western countries. A central method for achieving it was to project a favorable image of Kuwait abroad. The 2003 American-Kuwaiti Alliance (AKA) charter lists among its goals to “expand political relationships and policies” and to “foster cultural understanding” with the United States.69 The political exclusion of women was inconsistent with these aims. Media attention to women’s rights activism therefore embarrassed the Kuwaiti ruling elite.70 Finally, activists used their connections with government officials to lobby directly for women’s rights. The details emphasize the crucial importance of human agency to democratic progress. Lobbying in 2005 took a strongly assertive tone. Women no longer pleaded with government ministers to act on women’s suffrage; they demanded that the government apply its entire repertoire of political means to that end. Activists accused the Prime Minister of talking the talk but not walking the walk. Their press releases accused the government of responsibility for women’s lack of political rights rather than the parliamentary Islamists and tribalists who had opposed them even after the government had indicated its interest in getting this issue off the table. Pressure on the government included heated meetings with female activists. The Prime Minister then (now the Amir) implored them to lower the tone of their protests because they were hurting the government at home and abroad, but movement leaders promised to stop only after their objective had been achieved. Activists also tracked parliament members’ behavior when women’s rights came up for votes. They found that government-affiliated MPs and cabinet ministers were often absent when these votes were scheduled or actually voted against. They shared this information with the Prime Minister and the media. As women’s political rights made its way back on to the government’s agenda, activists escalated their protests. At a demonstration inside the parliament 69

American-Kuwaiti Alliance brochure, 2007; and see also Haila Al-Mekaimi, “Kuwaiti Women’s Tepid Political Awakening,” Arab Insight 2 (2008): 53-59; Tétreault, Stories of Democracy, supra note 24; Bacik, Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East, supra note 7 at pp. 119-122; Yetiv, Kuwait’s Democratic Experiment in its Broader International Context, supra note 46. 70 The international relations dimension was salient in the speech by Mohammad al-Sager on behalf of the government on the day of the crucial vote. In this respect, it is also instructive to recall that he returned for the historic vote immediately after a meeting with US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, herself a supporter of women’s rights in the Middle East. Rice is familiar with the Kuwaiti women’s rights movement and was in contact with Rola Dashti before the vote. Rice has often used one of the movement’s successful slogans “half a democracy is no democracy.” Rice made such remarks, for example, at the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, June 20, 2005. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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building during a session on women’s rights held about two months before the May 2005 vote, Rola Dashti was so vocal that she was forcibly dragged outside, gaining wide media coverage. In the face of this growing pressure, some Islamists conceded to granting women the right to vote, but only for municipal elections and not until 2009. Rola convinced other activists to refuse this compromise before the bill came up for its second reading on May 16, 2005. In the interim, suffragists pressed the government to use every resource to get the women’s rights law through the recalcitrant parliament. The activity of Rola Dashti appears especially noteworthy in this regard. In a press release after the minimalist bill passed on its first reading, the Kuwait Economic Society (KES), chaired by Dashti, issued a very harsh statement accusing the government of human rights abuse. The KES statement called on MPs not to vote for a bill that limited women’s rights to voting in municipal elections, and insisted that the head of state should stand by his earlier decision to give women political rights on May 16, which happened to coincide with the date of the Amir’s decree on women’s rights issued six years earlier. This blistering statement led to a final meeting between the Prime Minister and the activists in which the suffragists demanded an immediate resolution and suggested the winning tactic of presenting a new bill as an “act of urgency.” Interviews revealed that even at this point, about a week before the final vote on the bill, the government was still reluctant to confront Islamist members who opposed women’s rights, and informants reported that top government officials continued to try to persuade the activists to tone down their criticism. This suggests that government actions stemmed from last minute-decisions made under pressure rather than from a well-planned scheme of the ruling elite. A government representative promised to act on this matter in exchange for the women’s pledge to keep quiet – especially with regard to the press – until the actual date of the vote a week later. Although the activists agreed to this bargain, many continued to work behind the scenes, some joining an independent student protest scheduled the day before the vote. By then, the government had already prepared a measure to confer full political rights, and to introduce it as an act of urgency, requiring only one vote at a single session. The government also had reached secret agreements with a sufficient number of tribal MPs to ensure its passage, as was explained above. This sequence of events shows how crucial, after so many years of fruitless efforts, human agency and resistance skills were to the achievement of women’s political rights in Kuwait. LESSONS FROM THE KUWAITI WOMEN’S STRUGGLE FOR SUFFRAGE What theoretical lessons could be learned from the successful struggle for women’s suffrage in Kuwait? One paradoxical point is that modernization theory

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directs our attention to why there has not been a strong democratic movement from below in Kuwait and why the women’s struggle was confined for so long to a small group. Contrary to what modernization theory postulates, economic growth and rising levels of education and standards of living in Kuwait (and arguably, elsewhere) did not produce demands for democracy. In Kuwait, rising standards of living actually reinforced female dependency. From a psychological standpoint, they produced complacency and support for the non-democratic system among a majority of Kuwaitis grateful for generous social benefits and the absence of taxation, and unwilling to jeopardize what they had for women’s rights.71 As passive recipients of these high material, educational, and welfare payoffs, women remained loyal to their families, tribes, class, and to patriarchal cultural norms. Another paradoxical aspect of this struggle is the unexpected opposition by a democratically elected parliament to a major democratic reform promoted by authoritarian rulers otherwise adamant in their refusal to share power. It is illogical (although not completely unlikely) that the ruling elite expected to increase its power by the enfranchisement of women. Given the structure of Kuwaiti society, this act was more likely to reflect the existing balance of power, something we cannot address directly because the government has refused to release the data on the separate tallies of male and female votes for the last two elections. Indeed, in interviews conducted over many years, both liberals and conservatives said that female voters would return an even larger number of socially conservative MPs who tend to vote in cohesive blocks than the all-male electorate. “It’s not in our interests but we supported them on principle,” one male liberal activist noted regretfully in early 2010 about women’s suffrage.72 In fact, the enfranchisement of women did not add to political stability and to the government’s ability to get its programs through the parliament. Strong oppositionists were elected in 2006 and 2008, adding to the regime’s motivation to bring about the unscheduled elections of 2008 and 2009. Process tracing of the course of the women’s rights struggle shows that despite the hindering effects of modernization and power struggles between the rulers and the parliament, a small group of upper- and middle-class Kuwaiti women became committed to the suffrage issue. Rationally speaking, like the male liberals we mentioned earlier, these women had more to lose than to gain if voting were to be extended to women from tribal backgrounds who were expected to support candidates with interests widely divergent from their own. This point applies particularly to members of the WCSS and FKWA. Yet to these 71

Giacomo Luciani predicted precisely this kind of behavior in his article on “allocation states” such as Kuwait. See “Allocation vs. Production States: A Theoretical Framework,” in The Arab State, ed., Giacomo Luciani (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 65-84. 72 Interview by Tétreault 2010. http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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women the struggle was not so much about rational interests as about dignity and recognition.73 The goal of attaining suffrage had become embedded in their sense of self-esteem. Their social comparisons were not to passive women under the thumbs of family patriarchs but rather with Western women who take their voting rights for granted and kept asking them how it could be that in Kuwait men vote but women could not. The struggle of these women was boosted by two transformative events: the Iraqi invasion and the ensuing occupation and liberation, and the Amir’s (failed) decree of 1999. These events are not just “noise” obscuring more basic factors; they were the main generators of a dramatically changed political consciousness among leading activists. These kinds of developments are not easily captured by conventional approaches to social change that tend to focus on the quantity rather than the quality or type of protest-related events.74 As the Kuwaiti case shows, a single meaningful event can change political consciousness and trigger the emergence of protest movements, even when other macro-factors remain constant or unfavorable. The Kuwaiti case shows that human agency and fortuitous events can make a world of difference between successful democratic progress and failure. Activists learned from their past experience and developed skills by working with international women’s organizations. They appealed to a new generation of Kuwaitis and to others through text-messaging and the Internet, and utilized internal and international media to amplify their pressure on the government. These factors were certainly important. Yet their success also hinged on a high degree of contingency. Until two weeks before the final vote was taken on May 16, 2005, women’s political rights appeared unlikely to be forthcoming in any form. Even activists themselves doubted that suffrage and the right to run in national elections would pass due to the staunch resistance of Islamists and tribalists in the parliament. Indeed, the only women’s rights bill on the parliament’s agenda at the beginning of May 2005 would merely have allowed women to vote in local elections in 2009. Paradoxically, it is precisely the lack of success until that crucial time that turned what was expected to be yet another defeat into a surprising victory. Realizing that full political rights were about to be sacrificed – that is, with nothing really to lose – the leading activists took their gloves off, publicly charging the government with human rights abuses. Only as a result of this drastic and unexpected tactical shift did the government conduct an emergency reevaluation of the situation and use its entire repertoire of means to win the vote. It is difficult to conceptualize such haphazard and last-minute developments as 73

See also Ibrahim Anwar who suggests that the struggle for democratization in the Middle East and elsewhere stems from a human desire for honor and dignity. “Universal Values and Muslim Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 17(2006), pp. 11, 12. 74 See also Morris, Charting Futures for Sociology, supra note 40. Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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the products of rational planning by the Kuwaiti women’s rights movement or the ruling elite. They are better seen as adaptations to internal conditions rather than as a planned execution of a well-devised plan.75 The tactical decisions taken at this point were made ad hoc, by a small number of activists working outside of the formal women’s organizations and in ways that grossly contravened accepted social norms of female behavior. The activists were highly uncertain of the political consequences of their behavior to themselves as individuals, and to their cause, but they managed to transform an inchoate crisis into a “winning plan” to achieve democratic progress.76 It was suffragists’ skills and tactics that mitigated the impact of the social, political, and contingent factors that had worked against them over decades. In this respect, the resolve, passion, skills, and agency of a handful of women were crucial to the outcome of this movement. Without applying effective pressure on the ruling elite, women in Kuwait would probably still lack the basic right to vote and run for office. Applying fierce pressure was the only way this goal could have been reached in 2005 given the stances and actions of a majority in parliament that was, and largely continues to be, hostile to women’s rights. This is why women’s organizations gave up lobbying conservatives in parliament to concentrate their efforts on the government. In our view, the Kuwaiti government’s role in democratic progress is not very different from the U.S. government’s role during peak periods of the Civil Rights Movement: the responsibility for passing civil rights bills was the government’s but getting the government to act against Congressional conservatives required effective bottomup pressures. The lesson of this struggle strengthens arguments made by scholars who study nonviolent strategies for achieving democratic progress that an innovative tactic or a timely strategic choice may unfreeze longstanding and seemingly unpromising structural conditions and lead to democratic breakthroughs.77 And in spite of the unsettled state of gender politics in Kuwait, 75

See also, Holly J. et al., “Becoming Full Citizens: The U.S. Women's Jury Rights Campaigns, the Pace of Reform, and Strategic Adaptation,” American Journal of Sociology 113(2008): 11041147. 76 The American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt called her successful strategy for achieving woman suffrage in the United States the “winning plan.” 77 In this respect, our analysis provides support for, supplements, and extends the growing importance of the literature on nonviolent action and civil resistance. See Peter Ackerman, “Skills or Conditions: What Key Factors Shape the Success or Failure of Civil Resistance?” Presented at the Conference on Civil Resistance and Power Politics, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, March 15-18, 2007; Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force more Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, 1st ed., (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009); Kurt Schock, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, “Why Civil Resistance Works: http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol7/iss2/art1 DOI: 10.2202/1554-4419.1192

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four Kuwaiti women were returned to the parliament in May 2009, four years to the day from the passage of the women’s political rights law.

The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” International Security 33 (2008): 7-44; Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz and Sarah Beth Asher, eds., Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). Published by Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011

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