Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences

Laurie A. Brand

Columbia University Press

1998

Acknowledgements

 

A comparative study of three countries was a massive undertaking and numerous parties helped to make it possible. First, the Center for International Studies of the School of International Relations of the University of Southern California funded research assistants during the years 1993–94 and 1994–95 who helped me lay the groundwork for this study. I was also the recipient of several grants that enabled me to conduct field research. In chronological order they were: American Center for Oriental Research/United States Information Agency grants for research in Jordan during the summers of 1993 and 1994; a Council of American Overseas Research Centers award for research in Jordan and Morocco during the summer of 1995; a Social Science Research Council grant for field work in Jordan and Tunisia during the fall and winter of 1995; and an American Institute for Maghrib Studies grant for research in Morocco in the spring of 1996. I am most grateful to all of these organizations for the financial support given my project. Special thanks are also due: the American Center for Oriental Research, Amman for assistance and cooperation during my numerous research stints in Jordan; Susan Ossman and the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain, (IRMC) Rabat; Nabeel Khoury and Fatema-Zohra Salah, USIS, Rabat; La Source, Rabat; Jeanne Mrad and the Centre d’Etudes Maghrebines à Tunis; the Centre National de Documentation, Tunis; Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, Jordan University, Amman; Maha Khatib, director of the UNIFEM office, Amman; and Riccardo Bocco, director, Centre d’Etudes et Recherche sur le Moyen Orient Contemporain (CERMOC), Amman. Each of them offered vital informational and/or logistical support during my field research.

For valuable critiques (in both senses of the word) on various parts of the manuscripts at differents stages in its development I am most grateful to two anonymous readers as well as: Fayez Hammad, Mervet Hatem, Jane Jaquette, Amal Sabbagh, Ann Tickner, Mark Tessler, Greg White, and Ra’eda Zoubi. I would also like to thank Kate Wittenberg of Columbia University Press for supporting this project. Finally, I am indebted to the many Arab women whom I have been privileged to know and call friends over the course of the more than twenty years since my first stay in the region. Without their support and example this book would not and could not have been written.

Laurie A. Brand Los Angeles, California September 1997