I am proud and honored to accept this award on behalf of the Iranian Women’s Movement. It is a special honor to receive the award from the right honorable Kim Campbell whose life’s work and her personal conduct represent all that I and scores of others around the world aspire to. I am thankful to…
Category: Publications – Articles
Freedom Leads to Empowerment: Promoting Women's Leadership and Financial Independence
Women’s empowerment is a process. It involves raising consciousness, building skills and reforming unjust laws that limit women’s education, participation in decision making and economic independence. I.M.O.W. Global Council member Mahnaz Afkhami is president of Women’s Learning Partnership, which strives to empower women by practicing and promoting their leadership and self-sufficiency. The United Nation’s International…
Obama, Ahmadinejad, and the Women of Iran
This month, for the first time in 30 years, formal negotiations between the United States and Iran took place in a relatively positive atmosphere. As President Obama had promised during his campaign, dialogue took the place of diatribe. This is an important development. Why now and why during the term of the holocaust-denying, US-bashing President…
A Beaten Path
At the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iran was a society organized on precepts that for centuries has defined the subordinate position of women as the natural order of things. The nascent civil society faced the issue of women mostly as a problem between traditionalism and modernism. But as the moderns grew in…
Women are Driving Iran Toward Democracy
The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government’s version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would…
Women, Rights, and Security in Iran
Women in Iran must be free to choose what to think, what to say, what to do, and, of course, how to relate, or not to relate, to God In the past, human security was defined mainly in terms of state security. A half-century of international dialogue on rights, development, and peace, however, has led…
Information and Communication Technologies for Women’s Empowerment and Social Change
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution that the world has witnessed in the past decades has been potent and widespread. Today, we are living in an information age where technologies have drastically reduced the size of the globe by practically overcoming barriers of distance and time. We connect, communicate, and collaborate at speeds and…
Searching for the Sources of the Self
In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989) Charles Taylor introduces the concept of identity as follows: “…the question is often spontaneously phrased by people in the form: Who am I? But this can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us…