A Spring Aborted by Yusuf Sidani

Author:Yusuf Sidani [Sidani, Yusuf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2019-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

3.5. AUTHORITARIANISM

Authoritarianism and female disempowerment seem to go hand-in-hand. Authoritarianism can be understood at various levels, at the individual level or the state level. Authoritarian people place attachment to a group ideology or norm, and are usually prejudiced against those who challenge those norms (Brandt & Henry, 2012). When authoritarianism dominates in contexts where people are predisposed not to speak up, this creates inequities across the board, including inequities based on gender. For the Arab world, the aspirations of the Arab Spring brought hopes to various types of marginalized groups, including women. Better freedoms for those groups would have eventually helped support the causes of women (Sidani, 2016). By abandoning the Arab Spring, authoritarian regimes have reemerged. This is not good news for Arab women.

State authoritarianism can be explained by the type of political system in place, the level of education, and the level of authoritarian attitudes (Meloen, 1996). In other words, state authoritarianism occurs more in non-democracies, with low levels of education, and where people embrace high levels of authoritarian attitudes. This is bad news for the Arab world as those three elements are also found in many Arab countries.

In Latin America, it is reported that “a minority, but not insignificant, group of Latin American elites continues to favor authoritarian governance.”53 The same pattern seems to exist in many Arab countries. Some elements of the Arab society prefer an authoritarian stable regime rather than a democratic unstable one. In the wake of the Arab Spring, this seems to be the discourse of Arab regimes where people are given the choice of either freedom with chaos or dictatorship with stability. When people choose the latter, they are effectively selling out to the devil. In such cases, women pay a heavy price for authoritarian domination. What exists in the political institution, repeats itself in smaller arrangements, including the family and the workplace. The female becomes the dominated in the family as wife or a daughter, the dominated in the workplace as an employee, and the dominated – together with most males – to an authoritarian system in the public space.

State authoritarianism is associated with widening of the gender gap (Meloen, 1996). In Latin America, where there are interesting parallels to what happens in some Arab countries, violence against women, especially in the 1960s–1980s period, was used as a vehicle to assert authoritarian domination:

The process of imprisonment and torture of women political prisoners is female sexual slavery in its most hideous and blatantly obvious forms. It represents macho patriarchal contempt and misogyny crystallized and implemented through military-police structures of organized violence. (Bunster-Burotto, 1986)

Women faced violence as wives or daughters (inside the home) and as activists (outside the home) (Risley, 2006). Violent and aggressive patriarchy was active impacting women in both spheres, the private and the public.

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