Advocacy and Lobbying

As Cambodia's most visible female politician, Mu Sochua is a leader in the fight for democratic reform and women's rights, although both issues are looked at with skepticism in this male-dominated society.

In the two-year cycle of the political calendar, it is candidate-recruitment season—the time when Washington operatives fan out across the country to size up the political horseflesh.

Before Yemen's unification and the bloody civil war that followed, women in the southern port city of Aden say they were educated professionals with rights not experienced by those in the conservative north. Yemen's unification in 1990 curbed those rights.

In the aftermath of the wave of uprisings that took place across the Arab world in 2011, women were placed under the spotlight of post-revolution political discussion. During the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the contribution of Arab women to the toppling of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes was both undeniable and admired.

Marginalized by both a patriarchal society and the narrow confines of Western feminist discourse, Muslim women around the world are developing their own form of activism.

Political authoritarianism has been constant feature in the Arab political systems, and despite the ongoing “Arab Spring,” there is a continuing tendency to prevent women from freely participating in political processes. Recently, a handful of Arab countries have consented to slightly alter their political systems so as to allow women and opposition groups to have a greater say on political issues.