Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization by Denise M. Horn

Author:Denise M. Horn [Horn, Denise M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, Women's Studies, General
ISBN: 9781136991653
Google: rofFBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17586027
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Setting the Agenda: Policy goals and Changing Roles

The “limits” in the discourse are found in the agendas created by foreign funded projects. Once foreign funders began to establish the issues they were willing to fund, the notion of gender issues underwent a radical change in Estonia. In 1997, for example, the Soros Network Women’s Program identified violence against women as an underreported and underestimated issue in Estonia. In cooperation with the Nordic Council and the International Labor Organization, the Bureau of Gender Equality produced a study on domestic violence, which included interviews with victims of domestic violence, civil servants, and articles by eminent researchers (Papp interview 2/3/2004). In 2003, ENUT began conducting seminars with local police on the issue, followed by a report by the World Organization Against Torture to the UN Human Rights Committee (ENUT 2003).

Likewise, the emphasis upon trafficking in women has only recently become fodder for public debate, largely through the efforts of outside forces. During the 2001 Women and Democracy conference in Vilnius, the Swedish Minister of Gender Equality, Margareta Winberg, proposed a joint Nordic-Baltic campaign against trafficking in women (Nordic Council of Ministers 2004b). The campaign, which ended in 2003, also involved the efforts of several different NGOs, including the Open Estonia Institute and ENUT, which also received funding from the US embassy for these projects. With the aid of the US embassy and the US-based International Organization for Adolescents (IOFA), the AIDS Prevention Center, for example, worked on a pilot project to monitor trafficking in Estonia. The project resulted in a training seminar, the dissemination of anti-trafficking brochures and pamphlets, and lectures for young people in Tallinn and elsewhere. The Center was also able to create a website in both Estonian and Russian; funding for this program has ended, but the Center still manages to disseminate their remaining materials to schools in the area (AIDS Prevention Center interview 2/2/2004).

Although both the US and Nordic countries share an interest in the issue of trafficking—both as a transnational security issue and as a human rights issue—they do have different approaches, which are reflected in the funding language. The Nordic states view structural gender inequalities as the root of the problem. For the US, recent shifts in funding priorities hail women’s entrepreneurship as the remedy for human trafficking (Papp interview 2/4/2004).

In Estonia and other NIS countries, trafficking in women has become the US’s main point of entry into “women’s issues.” USAID’s anti-trafficking efforts fall under the auspices of its Social Transition Program, which also includes providing humanitarian and social assistance and combating infectious diseases; the causes of trafficking, however, are explicitly economic according to USAID’s own reports (USAID 2004). This approach creates even further dependence on economic models as trafficking is considered an economic issue rather than as both an economic and social issue.13

Trafficking is clearly considered a “women’s issue” by US policy makers. Although improving women’s knowledge of and access to business opportunities is a useful tool, what is questionable is the extent to which this

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.