About the project
Political Studies at Wits University and the Women's Rights and Citizenship Programme at IDRC are pleased to be hosting the Research and Training Institute on Women's Rights and Citizenship. The purpose of this project is to deepen the capacity of researchers, policy makers and practitioners for feminist research and analysis in relation to women's rights, citizenship and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Institute is open to up to fifteen participants and the project has two components: a training institute held in June in Johannesburg, with researchers returning again for a week in November; and the provision of seed funding.
The first two weeks of the training institute introduces participants to core concepts on women's rights and citizenship. The institute provides the opportunity to develop the highest quality of applied scholarship that is rooted in a deep understanding of African states and societies. The training institute extends beyond the conventional mode of degree courses to provide short and directed training to researchers who may be familiar with the local issues and understandings of gender, citizenship, and governance; but may lack the methodological tools, space and resources to develop these ideas and develop policy relevant research. Seed funding will be available to participants for baseline research and proposal development on research themes articulated in the Women's Rights and Citizenship prospectus. The project offers the opportunity for dynamic interchange between people from different contexts on the continent, and supports both existing and new feminist researchers. It is also intended to stimulate research and advocacy networks and facilitate new transnational interactions.
WHY CITIZENSHIP?
The wave of democratization in Africa from the 1990s ushered in liberal democracy with its attendant features of multiparty competition, regular elections and the removal of restrictions on the media, political organization and civil society mobilization. No fewer than 48 African countries held multiparty elections in the 1990s, most of these for the first time in decades. This changed political landscape has reshaped the ways in which African women’s organizations and feminists have engaged the state. There has been a remarkable re-focusing of feminist attention on the formal political spheres of state and political parties, with and emphasis on governance and citizenship as keywords of the new politics. A central demand of feminist activists at national and transnational levels or organizing has been the inclusion of women into structures of decision-making, often expressed as a demand for quotas.
There have been some fairly rapid gains with this strategy, most notably in fast-tracking women into national parliaments. African countries no longer lag at the bottom of league tables on representation; indeed, Rwanda has displaced Sweden at the top of the table. At the same time, there is a heightened awareness of the need to develop various national and transnational mechanisms that could guarantee the rights of citizens, and of women in particular. For example, the African Protocol on Women’s Rights seeks to hold member states of the African Union accountable for the removal of discriminatory legislation and the elimination of harmful cultural practices. The African Protocol was driven by feminist activists on the continent and facilitated a widespread internet-based discussion on its potential for advancing a feminist agenda. These processes of impacting within countries and more broadly are undoubtedly facilitated by the new critical mass of women politicians on the continent.
Yet it is also becoming increasingly clear that inclusion in formal structures of governing is not a sufficient condition for full citizenship (Bauer and Britton, 2006). The advent of liberal democracy may have reshaped the formal nature of institutions, but relationships between elites and subordinate groups have been harder to change. Elites may be increasingly more representative in gender terms, but remain equally unaccountable to constituencies of citizens. In some cases, liberal democratic institutions have been little more than a fig leaf over a range of informal practices that combine to keep women out of arenas of real power in the economy and state. Adherence to liberal democracy as an ideology of the state may have little or no relation to those regions of the continent where the state is virtually absent and rule through traditional leaders or warlords continues to be the norm. In these contexts, and exclusive preoccupation with entering the state may institutionalize a very thin version of citizenship.
Moreover, it is arguable whether notions of citizenship that are deeply embedded in the particular cultural and historical trajectories of Western Europe make sense to countries with very different histories and where the delineation of ‘the public’ as the primary space of equality is unhelpful. The challenge for African theorists is to reconceptualise how human rights should be understood, and to rethink the institutions through which rights can be secured. For feminists in particular, the emphasis on citizenship rights as a public sphere instrument requires critical analysis, both in terms of rethinking the nature of public and private in African contexts, as well as in terms of evaluating whether and how social justice might be extended to the private spheres of family and community. Furthermore, the conditions for full political participation, and not just representation, need to be more fully explored in research.
This is not to suggest that there is little to learn from non-African theorizing on governance and citizenship. Contemporary feminist debates on citizenship in other parts of the world are of enormous value to African analysts as well, and African theorization could inform these debates more substantially. New research is paying much greater attention to ‘thicker’ notions of governance and citizenship that includes features such as effective participation, the importance of sustainable representative associations and social movements, the relationship between formal and informal institutions in politics, the need for the development of policy alternatives that take into account women’s informal and unpaid work, and the exploration of the notion of women as embodied citizens. In African debates, the privatization of basic services and the introduction of user fees in a range of sectors, including health care, impact very directly on the quality of citizenship. Not only does privatization increase the demand for cash in poor households, it also increases the burdens on women in terms of domestic responsibilities. These areas are under-researched, and we hope that the Institute will provide some of the conceptual tools to encourage new areas of inquiry.
By broadening the notion of citizenship, we are able to focus on the question of how to ensure that women’s representation and political participation reduce inequalities (not only those of gender), and create the conditions for social and economic inclusion. This entails that we address the ways in which women are included in post-conflict settlements, and the expectations that are attached to political inclusion (for example, that women’s major role will be to ensure that there is peace, rather than any stronger notion of advancing policy claims). It is therefore important to consider the relationship between the nature of the broader political system, the kinds of spaces opened up for women and they ways in which women aggregate as a political power bloc. All of these factors impact on the kinds of political and policy outcomes that are possible through political citizenship.
