This book examines the ways women politicians in Serbia and Kosovo have imagined, constructed, and politicised national identity and gender while engaging with politics in the context of the democratisation process. The first book to focus on the work of women inside political structures, it draws on participant observation and interview material to answer the question of how women in positions of power and influence deal with their national identity and gender in societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Based on close studies of the work of a small number of women from different ethnic backgrounds, the author offers comparative analyses of the ways in which women politicians of different ethnicities respond to similar events in their everyday work. An original political ethnography that considers engagement of women in formal politics, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political structures and political participation, particularly as these relate to questions of gender, nation and ethnicity.

Political Legitimacy: Realism in Political Theory and Sociology explores the concept of political legitimacy, the nature of the normative foundation of politics and the state. With particular attention to the broad theoretical approach of political realism within political theory and political sociology, it examines the work of figures including Bernard Williams, Raymond Geuss, John Grey, Max Weber, and Niklas Luhmann, among others. Contending that in the face of the waning influence of political idealism, the insights of political realism constitute a promising way forward, the author also advances the view that realist political theory would benefit from sociological insights, particularly on the nature of the state. As such, Political Legitimacy will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, and political philosophy.

This volume provides one of the first comprehensive feminist readings of international statebuilding, with a specific focus on the case of Kosovo. Rather than simply showing how the state in Kosovo is being built by and through women and feminist encounters, this volume is interested to problematise women and feminist subjectivities vis-à-vis the state and statebuilding. The book challenges three main arguments related to the processes and subjects of statebuilding in Kosovo. First, the academic literature on Kosovo has a tendency to take the international intervention of 1999 as the originary point of statebuilding processes in Kosovo. Second, and relatedly, given Kosovo's unprecedented exposure to Western intervention and statebuilding, the majority of works start from the presumption that liberal interventionism in Kosovo (and elsewhere) is normatively more progressive than the previous system, and that the liberal interventionism and statebuilding are naturally gender progressive and gender-equal. The third argument has to do with the existing legal architecture on gender and women’s rights in contemporary Kosovo. The aim of the volume is to, on the one hand, problematise the evidence against the backdrop of everyday manifestations and/or performances of statebuilding and on the other hand interrogate the co-constitutive gender aspect. In terms of methodology, the volume brings together contributions that rely on traditional and multi-sited ethnography, and narrative research rooted in projects and initiatives in Kosovo. This allows the contributors to unearth new and silenced actors, entry points, subjects and subjectivities in processes of and related to statebuilding in Kosovo; feminist frictions and challenges to statebuilding in Kosovo; as well as encounters of heteronormative statebuilding. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Balkan politics, feminisms, and international relations, in general.

In the wake of communism’s decline, women’s concerns had become increasingly important in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Yet most discussions of post-communism changes had neglected women’s experiences. Originally published in 1993, this title was the first collection of its kind, presenting original essays by women scholars, politicians, activists, and former dissidents from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, along with essays by Western feminists and scholars. They discuss gender politics during the often turbulent transition and crises of post-communism, offering vivid accounts and analyses of the conditions facing women in each country.

The collapse of socialist regimes across Southeastern Europe changed the rules of the political game and led to the transformation of these societies. The status of women was immediately affected. The contributors to this volume contrast the status of women in the post-socialist societies of the region with their status under socialism.

This book explores the reproduction of gender ‘beneath the spectacle’ – that is, beneath ceremonial displays of power, in the UK House of Commons. Contributing to a fascinating literature on gender and parliaments, the book conceives of the House of Commons as a workplace, as well as a representative arena. It explores the everyday consequences for gendered power relations that this unique environment entails, as parliamentary actors perform their careers, citizenship, and public service. The book firstly explores ways to conceive of and to study gender in parliaments. Parliamentary ethnography – that is, spending time observing and engaging with parliamentary actors, is presented as an unparalleled methodology to better understand gender, power, and agency. The chapters that follow provide in-depth portrayals of gender and the parliamentary workplace. The book connects multiple actors in the House of Commons: MPs, officials, parliamentary researchers, and the (in)formal rules that structure the relationships between them.

This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.

This volume by international authors deals with the role of gender dynamics in the development of post-conflict societies. The authors describe and analyze diverse aspects of the intertwining of gender and other social and cultural relations from an interdisciplinary perspective. They analyze gendered post-conflict dynamics in diverse contexts asking for the consequences these developments have in the settings under investigation, such as Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Palestine and Afghanistan.

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society. Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

Family, Law and Politics, Volume II of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, brings together over 360 entries on women, family, law, politics, and Islamic cultures around the world.