Miscellaneous

Abstract

Using the often scarce space available to them in very different political circumstances, women’s strategies in defence of their human rights range from entryism to internationalism.

While fundamentalists read all women’s strategies as equally significant of betrayal of their identity, liberals outside Muslim countries and communities - and increasingly inside too - select the entryist strategy as the only legitimate one insofar as it matches our “nature”.

While the women’s movement remains united in standing for the need to use

There are few beliefs more entrenched in the modern liberal imagination than that of the virtues of pluralism and a multicultural society. The degree to which Sarajevo has assumed symbolic significance expresses the measure of attachment to the principles of a multicultural, multiethnic community. Just as in the thirties the struggle for Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War became symbolic of the defence of democracy against fascism, so the siege of Sarajevo has assumed a mythic status as a struggle between pluralism and barbarism.

Few developments in the post-Cold War era have captured public attention, stirred primal fears, stoked the fires of racism, and stymied critical thinking quite so thoroughly as the rise of fundamentalism. Although it is a force to be reckoned with in virtually every area of public endeavour, the rise of fundamentalism presents a very specific, and somewhat unique, challenge to the emerging field of reproductive health and rights.