Dawn Chatty

Annika Rabo

With the creation of the modern nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa, women have been and continue to be manipulated to represent a cultural ideal of perfect womanhood. This is often greatly at odds with the realities of women's lives and aspirations. However, individual women, through careful manipulation of gender relations, often succeed in casting aside the culturally accepted bonds which diminish their lives.Even so, women in groups are deemed unacceptable unless they conform to state mandates. In many countries in the Middle East, women are only legally permitted to form groups which are charitable organizations concerned with the welfare of the disabled or the handicapped. Clearly women in groups are perceived as a threat by the state.This challenging book examines the nature of the relationship between both women and the state and men and the state. It presents a balanced mix of theoretical and empirical research which analyzes both the formal and informal ways in which women have organized themselves, and been organized, in Arab society.

Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East

Organizing Women

Eirikur Bergmann

Anastasiya Astapova

Andreas Önnerfors

Asbjørn Dyrendal

Kasper Grotle Rasmussen

Hulda Thórisdóttir

This book explores the relevance of conspiracy theories in the modern social and political history of the Nordic Countries. The Nordic countries have traditionally imagined themselves as stable, wealthy, egalitarian welfare states. Conspiracy theories, mistrust and disunity, the argument goes, happened elsewhere in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), the Middle East or in the United States. This book paints a different picture by demonstrating that conspiracy theories have always existed in the Nordic region, both as a result of structural tensions between different groups and in the aftermath of traumatic events, but seem to have become more prominent over the last thirty or forty years. While the book covers events and developments in each of the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland) it is not a comparative country analysis. Rather, the book focuses on conspiracy theories in and about the Nordic region as a region, arguing that similarities in the trajectories of conspiratorial thinking are interesting to examine in cultural, social and political terms. The book takes a thematic approach, including looking at states and elites; family, gender and sexuality; migration and the outside view on the Nordic region; conspiracy theories about the Nordic countries; and Nordic Noir. This book will be of great interest to researchers on extremism, conspiracy theories and the politics of the Nordic Countries.

Conspiracy Theories and the Nordic Countries

Annika Rabo

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