Women’s Mobilisation, Gender, and Political Transformation in Mozambique

: The Case of the Law against Domestic Violence

Abstract

Feminist literature has been demonstrating that women’s mobilisation in general has played a relevant role in the promotion of political processes designed to tackle gender inequality. Regarding the specific context of Mozambique, the goal of this dissertation is to examine the role that women’s organisations of civil society – framed in the context of a broader Mozambican women’s movement – had in the struggle against domestic violence, which resulted in the approval of a law against domestic violence in 2009. This dissertation seeks to address two major lacunae in the literature. First there is no single study examining the political impact of the Mozambican women’s mobilisation against domestic violence from a theoretical perspective. Second, there is limited empirical research on how such a mobilisation shaped the entire struggle against domestic violence. It is argued and empirically demonstrated that – integrated in the broader women’s movement – women’s organisations were able to become agents of social and political transformations in regard to the issue of domestic violence. Women’s organisations played three distinct roles: articulators, agenda setters, and legislation shapers. Firstly, the organisations articulated the problem of domestic violence as a gendered process mostly affecting women. Secondly, the women’s organisations placed the problem of domestic violence on the political agenda, contesting the lack of formal mechanisms that tackled the issue – particularly legislation – and trying to shape the social perception regarding such a type of violence. Thirdly, those organisations were able to shape legislative outcomes by drafting a law and successfully lobbying members of parliament for its approval. The empirical evidence for my argument was gathered through fieldwork in the greater area of Maputo. Following a qualitative approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews to members of civil society associations involved in the struggle against domestic violence and to members of the Mozambican parliament. My findings contribute directly to the literature on Mozambican women’s movements and indirectly to the broad feminist theoretical and empirical work on tracing the action of civil society’s groups and on women’s movements as having a transformative impact on gender relations and formal politics.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Kate Maclean (Supervisor) & Deborah Potts (Supervisor)