The descriptive underrepresentation of women: an experimental research design focusing on the existence of political gender stereotypes in Flanders

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Purple vests. The origins of plural policing in Belgium

This article increases the body of knowledge on the origins of plural policing in a continental setting, more specifically in Belgium. Compared to other European countries, Belgium occupies a unique position, which can be explained by its particular constitutional setting. While non-police public actors execute police surveillance tasks in the public space, private security companies have no more competences than any ordinary citizen. Today maintenance of social disorder in the public space presents itself as a municipal patchwork, delineated by municipal autonomy and by political choices against privatisation. In this article we formulate an answer to the central research question “How did plural policing processes in Belgium originate and what is the current situation?” By means of a multiple case study with triangulation of methods, 27 years of security policy (1985-2012) are analysed. Contrasting with neo-liberal policies in the UK from the 1970s on, Belgian policy was shaped by the powerful presence of socio-democrats who occupied key ministry positions in the federal government, such as the minister of the Interior and the minister of Big Cities, throughout the entire time period. Political bargaining processes explain the ongoing investment in prevention and in “purple vests,” and the choice to exclude private actors in the public space

Defending their Land, Protecting their Men: Palestinian Women's Popular Resistance after the Second Intifada

types: ArticleWinning Paper of Cynthia Enloe Award 2011This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Volume 14, Issue 2, 2012 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.comPopular resistance has, following the recent uprisings in different Arab countries, received increased media and scholarly attention. Yet, the role that women and gender play in civil resistance movements remains understudied. In this article I analyse different forms, contexts and framings of Palestinian women's protest activism after 2000, arguing that their acts can potentially affect social and political change. Although so far unsuccessful in sustaining concrete material changes, women's embodied protest politics, by radically challenging conventional male-dominated political discourse and practice, might provide visionary outlines of a non-masculinist, non-militarist, yet proactive form of political culture in Palestine

Palestinian Women’s Everyday Resistance: Between Normality and Normalisation

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleThe paper traces Palestinian women’s understandings, practices and framings of everyday resistance. Women’s resistance acts consist of both materially-based survival strategies and various coping strategies at the ideational level. Focussing on the latter, this study investigates women’s practices of travelling to create (a sense of) normal joyful life for themselves, their families, friends and community with the aim of shedding light upon the complex and mutually constitutive interplay between women’s agency and the various social and political power structures. It is argued that Palestinian women, although framing their acts of crossing Israeli-imposed physical restriction as acts of resistance against the occupation, are in fact also seizing an opportunity to covertly challenge and trespass internal patriarchal forms of control.Exeter Universit