Yurttaşlığı yaratmak: Tunus ve Türkiye'deki bağımsız kadın hareketleri

During the last several decades, citizenship rights of women have been expanded through the collective action of women's movements in Turkey and in Tunisia. This study aims at understanding the different trajectories through which women's movements shape citizenship regimes in Turkey and in Tunisia from a multi-level perspective, one which encompasses simultaneously the macro-terrain of law making and political system design; meso-terrain of collective mobilization and the micro-terrain of individual lived experiences and the interactions in between. The central question of this dissertation is: What is the relationship between the women's rights movements and the citizenship regimes in which they are positioned? It engages in a dialogue with feminist citizenship literature by explaining the dynamic unfolding of institutions and processes of citizenship through women's collective mobilization. In this study, I argue that such processes can be captured by looking at the ways in which feminist activists make previously unrecognized grievances into legitimate and localized rights claims while employing a universalist language of rights. By studying dissent and resistance to existing laws and practices for citizenship rights, the dissertation demonstrates how acts of citizenship by women's movements shape the contours of citizenship regimes in terms of spaces of political participation, rebuilding of collective identities and resignification of the common good. By taking its cases as Turkey and Tunisia, the study highlights the agency of women's organizations in the call for full citizenship rights even in the absence of democratic regimes.