Author's note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at a February 2007 panel on “Empowering Arab Women? Assessing the Arab Human Development Report” at Columbia University in New York. It was also presented as part of a panel focused on the AHDR 2005 during the November 2007 meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Montreal. I am particularly grateful for the analyses, critiques, and suggestions of the interlocutors on these panels—Lila Abu-Lughod, Fida Adely, Heba Ezzat, Islah Jad, and Azza Karam—and the questions and comments of audience members. The careful reviews and suggestions provided by IJMES readers, Judith Tucker, and Sylvia Whitman were invaluable. I thank Lila Abu-Lughod for her encouragement and detailed comments. I am also grateful to Amaney Jamal and Khalid Medani for their suggestions as I began research for this essay and to Jeff Dillman for his assistance.

¹ United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Organizations, 2006)Google Scholar. Please see the overview published in this issue. Lila Abu-Lughod, Frances S. Hasso, and Fida J. Adely contributed to the following background note.

The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-part series focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as well as visionary political statement, this 230-page report (plus eighty pages of charts, statistics, and references) was produced over several years through the research, writing, and editing of over seventy-five individuals from the Arab world, including some of its most prominent social researchers and feminists.

In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. The global human development report, launched by the UNDP in 1990, put forth new measures in the form of a human development index for capturing this vision. This initial report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and human rights. The UNDP's Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org/) with information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed by select countries.

The AHDRs were produced under the auspices of and governed by the UNDP. The first, the AHDR 2002, presents and comparatively analyzes various indicators in Arab states and highlights three major “deficits” hindering human development that are addressed in depth in the volumes that follow: “Building a Knowledge Society” (2003), “Towards Freedom in the Arab World” (2004), and “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World” (2005).

² UNDP, AHDR 2005, 24, 231.

³ Lavergne, Marc, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report: A Critical Approach,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 21Google Scholar; Bayat, Asef, “Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change,” Development and Change 36 (2005): 1230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ UNDP, AHDR 2005, i–ii.

⁵ Ibid., 55, n. 1. Also important with respect to translation and term choices is that the Arabic subtitle of the AHDR 2005 is closer in English translation to “Toward the Renaissance of the Woman in the Arab Nation” (naḥwa nuhūḍ al-marʾa fi al-waṭan al-ʿArabī), reinforcing a singular, albeit familiar notion of “woman” (à la Qasim Amin's famous text) rather than conceptualizing women in the plural. The word waṭan in the Arabic title of the AHDR 2005 reinforces classic Pan-Arab nationalist formulations rather than a regional grouping of states. The Arabic and English titles, however, also challenge a simply Arab nationalist framing by articulating a focus on woman or women in the Arab nation or world rather than (the) Arab woman or women per se. This orientation provides a fissure that allows one to consider (even if the report only occasionally does so) women citizens of other ethnicities and non-Arab women of various socioeconomic backgrounds and nationalities who are laborers in the region. These discursive framings and translations hint at the contradictory agendas in the AHDR 2005 and reveal some of the assumptions examined in this essay.

⁶ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 22–24, 34.

⁷ Ibid., 34.

⁸ Dumortier, Brigitte, “Some Aspects of the Arab Human Development Report 2003 as Read by a European Scholar,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 45Google Scholar.

⁹ Such regional development agreements may very well require broader, plural, and more geographically pragmatic frameworks that, for example, include India, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan with Arab states in Asia Minor; sub-Saharan African countries in regional agreements with North African countries; and southern European states in agreements with other Mediterranean countries.

¹⁰ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 21, 26.

¹¹ Ibid., 21; Baroudi, Sami E., “The 2002 Arab Human Development Report: Implications for Democracy,” Middle East Policy XI (2004): 136Google Scholar.

¹² Baroudi, “The 2002 Arab Human Development Report,” 136; Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 29.

¹³ Mark Levine, “The UN Arab Human Development Report: A Critique,” Middle East Report Online, July 2002, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072602.html (accessed 1 January 2007).

¹⁴ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 33.

¹⁵ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 4, 39, 40–41.

¹⁶ Ibid., 5, 40, 38–48.

¹⁷ Ibid., 3, 34.

¹⁸ Ibid., 4, 49.

¹⁹ Ibid., 2.

²⁰ Baroudi, “The 2002 Arab Human Development Report,” 133.

²¹ Dumortier, “Some Aspects of the Arab Human Development Report 2003,” 42.

²² Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 26; Bayat, “Transforming the Arab World,” 1235.

²³ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 26.

²⁴ Bayat, “Transforming the Arab World,” 1231.

²⁵ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 168.

²⁶ Ibid., 20, 92, 201, 202.

²⁷ Ibid., 113.

²⁸ Ibid., 88.

²⁹ Ibid., 65–66.

³⁰ Ibid., 171.

³¹ For further discussion of AHDR 2005 assumptions regarding women's education, see Adely, Fida, “Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the Problem with Women's Choices,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105–122 (this issue)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² UNDP, AHDR 2005, 189.

³³ Ibid., 19, 173, 189–91, 194–95.

³⁴ Ibid., 189.

³⁵ Ibid., 194–95.

³⁶ Ibid., 195–96.

³⁷ Ibid., iv, 17–18, 180–82.

³⁸ Ibid., 178.

³⁹ Ibid., 1, 28–29, 129, 222–23.

⁴⁰ Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Dialects of Women's Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 83–103 (this issue)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 191.

⁴² Ali, Shaheen Sardar, “Women's Rights, CEDAW and International Human Rights Debates,” in Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World, ed. Parpart, Jane L., Rai, Shirin M., and Staudt, Kathleen (London: Routledge, 2002), 64–65Google Scholar.

⁴³ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 42.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 18, 184–85, 205–206.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 2, 32, 212.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 22, 64.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 6, 212.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 62.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 6, 61.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 6, 12, 126, 134–36, 177, 190, 193–94, 196.

⁵¹ Narayan, Uma, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁵² See, for example, UNDP, AHDR 2005, 114, box 4–1, 115, and 116–17 for discussion of the “world problem” of violence against women and how it must be opposed in the Arab world. Biopolitics refers to the type of power, produced by a range of modern institutions, that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” Michel Foucault argues that biopower at once individualizes and specifies bodies, depends on fields of knowledge that observe the “political practices and economics” of populations, and is ultimately concerned with “achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” to serve a variety of goals, not least of which is capitalist accumulation. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 137, 139, 140–41Google Scholar.

⁵³ UNDP, AHDR 2005, iv, 10, 31.

⁵⁴ UNDP website, “Human Development Reports: Composite Indices—HDI and beyond,” http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/indices/ (accessed 29 March 2008).

⁵⁵ Nussbaum, Martha and Sen, Amartya, “Introduction,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum, Martha and Sen, Amartya (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University. For a fuller discussion of the capabilities approach and the evolution and methodologies of the HDI, see Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko and Kumar, A. K. Shiva, eds., Readings in Human Development: Concepts, Measures and Policies for a Development Paradigm (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, prepared for the Human Development Report Office, UNDP, New York.

⁵⁶ Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well-Being,” in The Quality of Life, 30. The HDI was later “disaggregrated” to treat different groups in a country as if they were “a separate country” in order to measure differential access based on various axes. UNDP website, “Human Development Reports: Composite Indices—HDI and beyond.”

⁵⁷ Aaftaab, Gina Naheed, “(Re)Defining Public Spaces through Developmental Education for Afghan Women,” in Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion, and Space, ed. Falah, Ghazi-Walid and Nagel, Caroline (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 48Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Jane L. Parpart, Shirin M. Rai, and Kathleen Staudt, “Rethinking Em(power)ment, Gender and Development: An Introduction,” in Rethinking Empowerment, 9.

⁵⁹ These changes largely impact the development ratings of oil-producing wealthy Arab Gulf states, whose citizens fare relatively well according to the HDI. UNDP, AHDR website, “A New Way to Measure Human Development,” http://www.undp.org/arabstates/presskit2002e.shtml (accessed 29 March 2008).

⁶⁰ Nussbaum and Sen, “Introduction,” 5.

⁶¹ Ibid. On the issue of people's desires “in large part [being] formed by the circumstances and options that they perceive as being open to them,” also see Julia Annas, “Women and the Quality of Life: Two Norms or One?,” in The Quality of Life, 282.

⁶² In this account, these shared “features of humanness” exist in every culture, “whether or not they are in fact recognized [by local people] in local traditions.” Martha Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in The Quality of Life, 243, 250.

⁶³ UNDP website, “Human Development Reports: Measuring Inequality: Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM),” http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/indices/gdi_gem/ (accessed 29 March 2008).

⁶⁴ AHDR 2005, table A4–20, 306.

⁶⁵ Ibid. and table A4–19, 305.

⁶⁶ Grewal, Inderpal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 134, 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 134, 131–43, 140Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 8; Timothy Mitchell, “State, Economy, and the State Effect,” in The Anthropology of the State, 170, 175–76; Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” in The Anthropology of the State, 113–14.

⁷⁰ Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Inda, Jonathan Xavier (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 105–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ UNDP website, “A World of Development Experience,” http://www.undp.org/about/ (accessed 27 March 2008).

⁷² Ferguson and Gupta, “Spatializing States.” Critics of transnational governmentalities, many of whom are interested in the systematic and organized ways in which groups in the global South are impoverished, subordinated, or otherwise deprived, argue that states and the situations and conditions of peoples living within them cannot be understood outside of global, regional, and transnational processes and histories, including colonialism and imperialism. Ibid;Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 90, 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ Sen, Gita and Grown, Caren, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 9Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 15–16, 18.

⁷⁵ Sen, Gita and Batliwala, Srilatha, “Empowering Women for Reproductive Rights,” in Women's Empowerment and Demographic Processes: Moving Beyond Cairo, ed. Presser, Harriet B. and Sen, Gita (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Grewal, Transnational America, 125.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 125–26, 133.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 153.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 122–23, 133.

⁸⁰ Aaftaab, “(Re)Defining Public Spaces,” 44.

⁸¹ Ibid., 45.

⁸² Ibid., 47–48.

⁸³ Ibid., 47.

⁸⁴ Benhabib, Seyla, Another Cosmopolitanism, with Waldron, Jeremy, Honig, Bonnie, and Kymlicka, Will, ed. Post, Robert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the issue of “cultural relativity,” also see Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues,” 260–61; Nussbaum, Martha, “Introduction,” in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Nussbaum, Martha and Glover, Jonathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1, 5, a study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University.

⁸⁵ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 15–16; Benhabib, Seyla, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 24, 25Google Scholar; Narayan, Uma, Dislocating Cultures; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Russo, Ann, and Torres, Lourdes, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Al-Ali, Nadje, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moallem, Minoo, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Benhabib, Claims of Culture, 183–84.

⁸⁷ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 10, 118–20.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 118–20.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 119, 221.

⁹⁰ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 22.

⁹¹ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 16, 226.

⁹² Ibid., 16, 17.

⁹³ Ibid., 16.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 166; Sharabi, Hisham, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 15–16, 165.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 197.

⁹⁷ For an excellent analysis of these patriarchal processes in postcolonial Iraq and as they were embedded in international treatment of Iraq in the 1990s, see Ismael, Jacqueline S. and Ismael, Shereen T., “Gender and the State in Iraq,” in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Joseph, Suad (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press 2000), 185–211Google Scholar. The dynamic mobilization of “culture” with respect to gender and sexuality in post-2003 Iraq are discussed in Hasso, Frances S., “‘Culture Knowledge’ and the Violence of Imperialism: Rethinking The Arab Mind,” MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (2007), esp. 8–9Google Scholar, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/issues/2007sp/CULTURE%20KNOWLEDGE-%20Hasso.pdf (accessed 28 March 2008).

⁹⁸ Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 22.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 25. Indeed, Lavergne found in the AHDR 2003 evidence of a “deep state of self-contempt by the Arab thinkers themselves” in their focus on the United States as the source for advanced education and in their underestimation of the valuable knowledge and positive orientations toward knowledge that exist in the Arab region. Ibid., 27.

¹⁰⁰ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 17, 151–52, 176.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 17, 174.

¹⁰² Ibid., 15, 159–60.

¹⁰³ See Lavergne, “The 2003 Arab Human Development Report,” 30–31.

¹⁰⁴ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 127, 146–47, 195.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., vii, 17.

¹⁰⁶ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 152.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 153.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 149, 150, box 6–5.

¹⁰⁹ Parpart, Rai, and Staudt, “Rethinking Em(power)ment,” 3.

¹¹⁰ Parpart, Jane, “Lessons from the Field: Rethinking Empowerment, Gender and Development from a Post-(Post?) Development Perspective,” in Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism and Representation, ed. Saunders, Kriemild (London: Zed Books, 2002), 55Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 60–61.

¹¹² Levine, “The UN Arab Human Development Report,” 5.

¹¹³ Bayat, “Transforming the Arab World,” 1234.

¹¹⁴ Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, “Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization,” in The Anthropology of the State, 1–41.

¹¹⁵ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 216.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 222, 226.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 2, 30.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., 213.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 23.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 203.

¹²¹ Aaftaab, “(Re)Defining Public Spaces,” 49.

¹²² UNDP, AHDR 2005, vii.

¹²³ Ibid., 21, 29, 99, 127–28, 207–12.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 128.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 211, box 9–3.

¹²⁶ Ferguson, Global Shadows, 32.