Arab Media & Society has an interesting and useful study by Chiara Bernardi, a PhD Student at the Department of Applied Social Science, London Metropolitan University. She looks at how and where Saudi female bloggers (for the most part) assess ‘women’s issues’ and where that assessment overlaps the assessments by International Governmental Organizations (IGOs). She finds that while there is some overlap, there are also major differences.

It has been my perception since at least 2001 that the ‘women’s issues’ that Saudi women find important is different from with what international organizations believe to be important. The international organizations tend to follow a Western feminist trajectory, focusing—when they look at Saudi Arabia at all—on education and divorce. Saudi women agree on those two points, but far more seriously. They differ, though, when it comes to issues like the abaya, gender segregation, male guardianship, stoning, and honor killings, issues that simply don’t show up in the IGO lists. Not surprisingly, though, the issues that Saudi women identify are recognized by regional NGOs.

You can download the full report here [15-page PDF document]. I recommend you do!

Saudi bloggers, women’s issues and NGOs
Chiara Bernardi

This paper examines how women’s issues in Saudi Arabia have been articulated in several parts of cyberspace and how they have been ‘rendered public’ (this research will use the term ‘public-ise’ as defined by Noortje Marres1) by Saudi women’s blogs, news media outlets and regional or international organizations that cover women’s issues .

In particular, it will analyze how women’s issues in Saudi Arabia are articulated on social media platforms that fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella, and see if and how those same issues are comparably articulated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international government organizations (IGOs), and media outlets.

This paper does not aim to analyze whether the Internet is a catalyst for policy-making changes or only another tool activated through human interaction. Instead it aims to investigate how certain controversies (issue language, issue formation in cyberspace and network formation around the issue: ‘women’s issues in Saudi Arabia’) are articulated and developed through Web 2.0 platforms, namely blogs and other tools (YouTube, RSS feeds, Diggit).
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