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In the context of the conference's topic of 'Strategic Communication and Public Engagement' comes this case study, which illustrates the creative use of social media in crowdsourcing ideas from the public with the goal of formulating government policy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Unlike the usual model of top-down policy formulation in many developing countries, the UAE government adopted an experiment entitled 'The UAE Brainstorming Session', which is the country's first technology-based citizen engagement event that leveraged the highly popular social media platforms to elicit ideas and suggestions about public services. Specifically, two under-performing national sectors were targeted; public health and education. Citizens and residents were invited to identify the main issues in these two sectors and offer their suggestions to address them. The UAE Prime Minister personally tweeted inviting everyone to participate. The public response to this initiative was substantial, with 82,000 new ideas delivered by several social media channels. A ministerial committee then shortlisted the best ideas, suggestions, and these were subsequently discussed in a strategic cabinet retreat. The next step was government approval of several initiatives, which were subsequently implemented. Lessons learned from this case study can be beneficial to many countries that are considering similar technology-based initiatives that utilize popular and accessible social media as public policy tools and instruments of citizen engagement.Keywords: Strategic Communication; Citizen Engagement; Social Media; United Arab Emirates Government.

While many in the West regard feminism and Islam as a contradiction in terms, many Muslims in the East have perceived Western feminist forces in their midst as an assault upon their culture. In this career-spanning collection of influential essays, Margot Badran presents the feminisms that Muslim women have created, and examines Islamic and secular feminist ideologies side by side. Borne out of over two decades of work, this important volume combines essays from a variety of sources, ranging from those which originated as conference papers to those published in the popular press. Also includ

Muslim women's knowledge production in the greater Maghreb: the example of Nana Asma'u of Northern Nigeria / Beverly B. Mack -- Rethinking marginality and agency in postcolonial Niger: a social biography of a Sufi woman scholar / Ousseina D. Alidou -- Deconstructing Islamic feminism: a look at Fatima Mernissi / Raja Rhouni -- Embodied tafsir: South African Muslim women confront gender violence in marriage / Sa'diyyah Shaikh -- Changing conceptions of moral womanhood in Somali popular songs, 1960-1990 / Lidwien Kapteijns -- Guidelines for the ideal mu slim woman: gender ideology and practice in the Tabligh Jamaʻat in the Gambia / Marloes Janson -- Titanic in Kano: video, gender, and Islam / Heike Behrend -- Shariʻa activism and Zina in Nigeria in the era of hudud / Margot Badran -- Women and men put Islamic law to their own use: monogamy versus secret marriage in Mauritania / Corinne Fortier -- Islam, gender, and democracy in Morocco: the making of the mudawana reform / Julie E. Pruzan-Jørgensen -- Family law reform in Mali: contentious debates and elusive outcomes / Benjamin F. Soares -- Legal recognition of Muslim marriages in South Africa / Rashida Manjoo

The emergence and evolution of Egyptian feminism is an integral, but previously untold, part of the history of modern Egypt. Drawing upon a wide range of women's sources--memoirs, letters, essays, journalistic articles, fiction, treatises, and extensive oral histories--Margot Badran shows how Egyptian women assumed agency and in so doing subverted and refigured the conventional patriarchal order. Unsettling a common claim that "feminism is Western" and dismantling the alleged opposition between feminism and Islam, the book demonstrates how the Egyptian feminist movement in the first half of th

AbstractUnder the current confessional system, representative democracy in Lebanon suffers from a double crisis. At the institutional level, the prolonged presidential and cabinet vacancies combined with the slowness of the governmental machine reveal a considerable efficiency deficit. At the structural level, the current electoral representative system increasingly supports the organization of an oligarchic Lebanese regime where the concentration of power in a small number of people serves to benefit the interests of the confessional political elite. In this paper, I consider the establishment of a randomly selected senate as an alternative political answer to the crisis facing representative democracy in Lebanon. I identify the structural and political inadequacies of one of the dominant proposed resolutions, the "referendum solution," to deal with the current representative crisis. I argue that the introduction of sortition in Lebanese political procedures could be considered an evolution toward further deliberative democratization of the system.