Suchergebnisse

Während dem Libanon im Frühjahr 2006 Rekordeinnahmen aus dem Fremdenverkehr, dem regionalen Handel und der Bauwirtschaft vorausgesagt wurden und eine rasche Erholung nach dem Kriegssommer noch im September für möglich gehalten wurde, scheint das Land im Spätwinter 2007 wieder einmal vor dem Scheideweg zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Wiederaufbau zu stehen. Die politische Pattsituation, in der sich der Libanon derzeit befindet, scheint zu bestätigen, dass die religiöse, kulturelle und soziale Vielfalt des Landes sowohl als Segen wie auch als Fluch zu verstehen ist. Welche Rolle spielt hierbei die Zivilgesellschaft? Können die NGOs, freien Medien, Think Tanks und Bildungseinrichtungen des Landes Ansätze für eine Lösung der libanesischen Dauerkrise anbieten oder sind sie womöglich integraler Bestandteil des Problems? Gestaltet sich das Verhältnis der Bürger zum Staat, wie auch der Umgang der Bewohner des Landes untereinander, anders als in den benachbarten arabischen Ländern? Sollte der libanesische Sonderweg zur Demokratie sich doch als gangbar erweisen, kann dies als Vorbild für den gesamten Nahen- und Mittleren Osten gesehen werden? Anhand der Entwicklungen des Jahres 2006 wird in dem Beitrag diesen Fragen nachgegangen und Lösungsmöglichkeiten werden angedeutet. Als zweiter Themenkomplex wird die internationale Einmischung in die Innenpolitik Libanons betrachtet. (ICB2)

Der Terror wird oft überwiegend aus der Sicht der Gewalt- und Konfliktbekämpfung betrachtet, wobei Fragen wie Stabilität, Ordnung und Bewahrung von Herrschaftsinteressen im Vordergrund stehen. Diese Betrachtungsweise siedelt den Terrorismus ausschließlich im öffentlichen Raum an und begreift ihn als eine Gefährdung des Gesellschaftssystems, wodurch bestehende Machtverhältnisse unhinterfragt bleiben. Da es im Nahen und Mittleren Osten kaum alltägliche Lebensbereiche gibt, die nicht von Terror beeinträchtigt sind, ist eine geschlechtsspezifische Herangehensweise geeignet, die vielfältigen gesellschaftlichen Erscheinungsformen des Terrors sichtbar zu machen und die strenge Abgrenzung zwischen öffentlichen und privaten Lebensbereichen aufzuheben. Die Autorin stützt sich in ihrem Beitrag sowohl auf Dokumente der UNO zur Terrorismusbekämpfung und zum Gender Mainstreaming bei der Konfliktbewältigung in Krisengebieten als auch auf die einschlägige Literatur zur Lage der Minderheiten und zur Entwicklung der Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Region. Als Fallbeispiele für den Terror im Alltag weist sie auf die Lebensbedingungen von Minderheiten im Irak und Libanon sowie auf die Situation von asiatischen und afrikanischen Hausgehilfinnen im arabischen Raum hin und diskutiert die Frage, inwieweit der Terror eine "stabilisierende Grundhaltung" im privaten Bereich ist. (ICI)

Portraying the lives of North African and Middle Eastern women and girls in places as diverse as Argentina, Canada, France, India, and the United States accentuates the artificiality of the concept "Arab diaspora." As many of the articles in this file point out, a constructed sense of group identity was initially externally imposed. It was based more on the defining power of host societies than on any common denominators easily recognized by the respective Arab immigrant communities themselves.

Work-life balance has been on the agenda for almost half a century throughout the Western, industrialized world. More recently, assisting working fathers to reconcile their career and family needs has also gained the support of governments, the social partners (labor and business associations), NGOs, and the media in North America, the European Union, Australia, Japan, and more recently in the new democracies of Europe and Latin America. The international business community has become aware that family-friendly hiring, scheduling, and promotion schemes are good for business. Expanding the logic of family friendliness from a uniquely women's issue to a genuinely gender mainstreamed approach has boosted productivity, sales, and retention rates and thus benefited employers, employees, customers, and the public sector servicing all three. The bottom line doesn't lie. In the case of the family-friendly workplace, the interests of profits and people go hand-in-hand.

There are few topics as emotionally charged as the issue of full citizenship rights for women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Today, in no country in the Arab world do women enjoy the same rights as men with respect to transferring citizenship to their children and spouses. This form of discrimination not only taints the family life of hundreds of thousands of Arab women, it also severely burdens their "alien" children and husbands, blocking their access to education, welfare services, career advancement, social and political integration, and cultural assimilation. Viewed from the perspective of the host society, an Arab woman who marries outside the confines of her respective nation-state transitions from the authority of her father's house to that of an alien household. She is now ostensibly under the control of the cultural norms and legal codes of her husband's homeland.

This issue of Al-Raida deals with the "Other" from a triply detached perspective. Writing about ethnic and linguistic minorities, immigrants and "guest workers" in the Middle East and North Africa challenges the researcher and author to see the Arab world as more than merely the object of Western expropriation and Orientalist misinterpretation. The peoples of our region have well demonstrated their ability to be both the victim and the victimizer, oft times simultaneously.

Delineating gender and cultural identities is closely related to power. Rarely, if ever, are individuals permitted to freely choose how they wish to live their lives as women or men, as members or outsiders vis-à-vis the societal mainstream.This issue of Al-Raida deals with the many forms of "notbelonging" and the struggle for recognition within the member states of the Arab League. It is divided into five sections reflecting the disparate vantage points from which non-Arab women have viewed their role in the Arab world over a period of over 150 years.

Euro-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration (CARIM) ; Migration policy is one of the fields least scrutinized in the Arab world. Responding to international economic trends, policy makers, social partners, and civil society players in Jordan and Lebanon have come to the realization that certain labour market bottlenecks can only be overcome by bringing in foreign workers. This has led to a significant immigration of laborers from a wide variety of countries and forced all relevant participants in the policy making process to renew their interest in coordinated temporary labour migration schemes. Both in Jordan and Lebanon, experts and policy makers alike see opportunities in these schemes that can help them meet the changing demands in their labour markets without permanently adding to their populations and labour forces. In the countries of origin, reciprocally, temporary labour migration schemes are intended to allow governments to alleviate pressures on their labour markets in the short and medium-term, and also let them reap the benefits of migration, through remittances and skill acquisition. In this study the authors will consider, based on a tripartite approach, whether the interests of employers and workers organizations coincide with those of governments in designing and implementing temporary migration schemes. The internationally codified rights of migrant workers to equality and non-discrimination and to their integration into societies and workplaces will be compared to the realities on the ground in Lebanon and Jordan. Have the limited provisions for protecting employees' rights and a lack of their integration into the host societies negatively affected policy goals, closely linked to social cohesion? Does the effective protection of migrant workers contradict the needs of the indigenous populations in Lebanon and Jordan in general? Can the empowerment of the migrants themselves and their inclusion into the tripartite decision making process facilitate migration policy reform? Which social players can – and have – step in if the state and social partners neglect those roles foreseen for them by the international organizations dealing primarily with migrant labour, first and foremost the International Labour Organization (ILO)? ; CARIM is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Union

Lebanese from all social and economic classes were attracted by the international migration movement of the nineteenth century. Men and women, married and single, middle class and underprivileged all sought their fortune through migration. Rather surprisingly, given the patriarchal norms of Middle Eastern society, Christian as well as Muslim married women sometimes emigrated without their husbands and families, for, as A. Khater notes, they "had their [own] reasons to leave… Some wanted to escape an unhappy marriage, others sought a better financial status, and a few were after adventure, but most went looking for the 'family'."