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Reviewed by:
  • Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE
  • Neha Vora
Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE Wanda Krause . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. vii, 264. ISBN 0-230-60956-3.

Women in Civil Society explores the role of women in the development of civil society in the United Arab Emirates. The topic of study itself, the author argues, challenges approaches to civil society that question whether non-democratic and Islamic countries can even have civil society. Likewise, it challenges work that assumes women in the Middle East are more oppressed and less active than women elsewhere in promoting change for public good. Krause aims to provide a contextually specific [End Page 131] and historically grounded definition of civil society in the UAE, while also acknowledging that the borders of civil society and the boundaries between the state and civil society are shifting and porous. She focuses on official women's organizations, Islamic associations, and informal networks, considering three main criteria for civil society: participation, civility, and empowerment. By opening the possibility of civil society within authoritarianism, and by challenging ideas that Islamic organizations are at their core antithetical to civility, Krause is able to ask the framing question of her study, "What role do UAE women play in civil society development?" Because of the dearth of scholarly information on this topic, Krause mostly relies upon ethnographic evidence in the form of interviews with UAE women in order to argue that women have a significant place in civil society forms in the UAE.

Krause begins her book by tracing the authoritarianism of the state and its attempts to maintain legitimacy through "inclusionary corporatism." The UAE government attempts to produce, through heritage projects, education, and moderate Islam, a unified national identity and an apolitical subject population. Part of nation-building in the UAE has been the development of women's education and employment opportunities, mostly in order to produce a globally productive citizenry and reduce the reliance on foreign labor, which makes up 98% of the workforce. As a result, women's literacy has skyrocketed in the last two decades, and women are increasingly visible in government and other jobs. However, government rhetoric also emphasizes women's gendered responsibilities to the family, and women are still marginalized in many ways. The state funds certain organizations that further its own causes, including several women's groups. Non-state-sponsored organizations are only allowed to operate if they are deemed sufficiently "apolitical" by the government.

The ethnographic chapters of the book (3, 4, 5) consider women's activism in each of the aforementioned arenas: state-sponsored women's groups, Islamic organizations, and informal networks. Krause investigates the types of subjects that these groups produce and their implications for civil society. She concludes that government-run women's organizations ultimately act as ways for the government to co-opt civil society and are markers of a "rentier governmentality" in which GONGOs (government-organized NGOs) legitimize the state, in particular by promoting feminized [End Page 132] roles and patrimonial nationalism. In fact, Krause argues, "state feminism has emerged as a key modality of governmentality" (90) by fostering gendered dependent subjects.

Islamic associations, in contrast, seek reform at the personal and societal level, and while they do not challenge the state directly, they have a large impact on Emirati society. By promoting ideas of what is anti-Islamic in society, e.g., discos and drinking, and by defining themselves against certain Others such as, e.g., housemaids and Westerners, these groups foster personal improvement as well as a sense of umma (community) that is in some ways more horizontal and more inclusive than Emirati national identity. While the membership of state-sponsored groups that Krause studied consisted primarily of women, the study groups (halaqas), student clubs, learning centers, and women's committees of Islamic organizations consisted mostly of foreigners, many of whom were women who were in the UAE not as dependents but rather as the primary breadwinners for their families back home. These groups allow for a certain degree of criticism of society because of their relative autonomy and high rates of volunteerism...

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