Power and positionality: gender and development in Iraq

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of the
 Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University News Magazine.

It was 2012, and I was in Bnaslawa, a town outside of Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. I was meeting with a group of community leaders involved in a development project to identify and address priority infrastructure goals, such as constructing new roads or equipping health centers with medical supplies. Although the community groups were entirely Iraqi-led, they were mobilized by the project, which was designed and managed by international and American donors and development practitioners.
The purpose of my meeting was to conduct a “gender assessment”—a development industry term for a type of participatory re-search designed to determine the extent to which a project has integrated principles of gender equity into its activities. In an attempt to be inclusive of women, this particular project required that at least 3 of the 12 community group leaders be women. “This [quota] is not equality,” one woman in the group told me. She added angrily that had it not been for that quota, they would have achieved 50 percent female representation on the board. As I spoke with the other women, it became evident that they understood the quota to indicate there should be a maximum, rather than a minimum, of three women. Clearly, the intended impact of the quota was lost somewhere between the American practitioners who came up with it and the Iraqi women who were supposed to be benefiting from it. This misunderstanding was a stark reminder of how a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to gender equity and equality that is driven by outside actors doesn’t work. It often causes further harm.

One of the most powerful things I learned during my time in the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program at Georgetown University was the importance of regularly reflecting on my own positionality and power as a white American studying—and later working in—the MENA and other regions around the world that have been directly impacted by my own country’s historical and present actions. I must continue to do that as a development practitioner focused on gender equality, a field in which most of the people deciding funding and program priorities are still, like me, largely from or based in the United States, Europe, and Canada. In my work, I try to focus on pushing for shifts in power and resources to the women and genderqueer-led movements and organizations that are working for gender equity in their own communities so that women like the ones I met in Bnaslawa can determine their own actions for advancing gender equity instead of being forced to follow our misguided ones.