This commentary is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and OtherWords. Many American women are still told they have to choose between love and career. But for many immigrants, that outdated dilemma is legally enforced. “I am here legally but I don’t have...
Among its many acts of terror, the Islamic State has a well-earned reputation for violence against women. Labeled exceedingly radical even by al-Qaeda’s standards, the group's reprehensible treatment of women has included sexual enslavement, forced marriages, and the...
On December 10 — International Human Rights Day — Takeshi Onaga began his term as the new governor of Okinawa. Last month, the citizens of Okinawa delivered a landslide victory to Onaga, who ran on a platform opposing the construction of a new U.S. Marine Corps base...
Thirty-three year old Maka Tsivtsivadze was teaching her English class at Ilia State University in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi when her former husband arrived at her classroom unexpectedly. Maka left her students in the room and joined him in the university...
The deadliest Ebola outbreak on record is sweeping West Africa, with over 3,400 lives claimed already. The World Health Organization estimates that 20,000 additional cases will be reported by November. And women are being affected most severely. In fact, 75 percent of...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. Revolutions elevate a new and unexpected group of people to power. In East-Central Europe in 1990, an electrician became the president of Poland, a playwright the president of Czechoslovakia, and a philosopher the president of...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. Take a look at the World section of nearly any mainstream news outlet and the main story will be Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, or Gaza—all of which are suffering acutely from their respective...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. The feminist movement, which gathered strength in the 1960s and 1970s in the West, arrived in East-Central Europe much later. Women’s equality was a stated principle of the Communist governments, and official women’s...
While filming a documentary in Syria in the summer of 2003, I visited the Jaramana refugee camp near Damascus. Run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Jaramana at the time housed around 5,000 registered Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli wars of...
From the initial uprisings against the government of Bashar al-Assad in spring 2011, women in Syria have organized and participated in peaceful demonstrations and provided vital humanitarian assistance to those in need. Like their male counterparts, Syrian women who...