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This book is a must-read. Informed by feminist insights and gender-and-development research, it takes the reader back to the 1990s to explain how the punitive sanctions regime--imposed by the United Nations Security Council following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait--not only adversely affected the literacy, health, and welfare of large proportions of the Iraqi population but also had specific gendered effects, notably in terms of the deterioration of women's social roles, legal status, and family positions. Deftly combining feminist analysis, interview data, discussion of the details of the sanctions regime, and presentation of statistics on the social and infrastructural effects of the sanctions, Yasmin Husein al-Jawaheri makes an argument that is bold, sophisticated, and entirely convincing.
Women in Iraq entailed field research in the early part of this decade. A section on the research methods deployed explains that some 227 Iraqi women were interviewed in households of varying socioeconomic means across three districts in Baghdad City. We are not told whether the author conducted all the interviews or if a research team did so. In any event, the book draws on only a small number of those interviews to highlight the arguments, rather than presenting systematic quantitative information based on the entire sample.
The book consists of seven chapters. The first chapter...