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Food for Thought: Data, Policy and Gender-Based Violence in the Arab Gulf States

Ensuring the safety & well-being of women and migrant workers.
The Food for Thought series features student-focused events with speakers from a variety of disciplines discussing topics related to global development.
Stanford King Center on Global Development
Stanford Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
Stanford Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD)

Event Details:

Monday, April 15, 2024
12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT

Location

Gunn SIEPR Building

This event is open to:

Students

How are advocates against gender-based violence overcoming traditional Kuwaiti cultural norms, patriarchal structures, and legislative frameworks, to ensure the safety and well-being of women and vulnerable migrant workers?

On Monday, April 15, 2024, the King Center on Global Development invited the Stanford student community to hear from Lubna Al-Kazi and Lisa Blaydes on gender-based violence and advocacy solutions across Arab Gulf states.

A pioneer in Kuwaiti and international gender research and advocacy, Lubna Al-Kazi, Sociology Professor at Kuwait University, discussed new legislation around gender-based violence in Kuwait. Lisa Blaydes, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, shared data from her King Center-funded survey of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers in Kuwait, an overwhelmingly female workforce. She discussed data that could inform effective policies, enforcement mechanisms, and support systems to ensure the safety of women in the Arab Gulf states and the well-being of migrant domestic workers.

This event was co-sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

About the Speakers:

Lubna Al-Kazi, Sociology Professor at Kuwait University

Lubna Al-Kazi

Lubna Al-Kazi is a Sociology Professor at Kuwait University. She is the founder and director of Kuwait University’s Women’s Research and Studies Center. The center leads regional and national women’s leadership trainings in partnership with the United Nations (UN) and the Women and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The center is leading implementation of: the gender component of Kuwait’s National Development Plan; the “New Kuwait” 2035 development plan; as well as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5/Gender Equality (SDG5) in Kuwait. 

Dr. Al-Kazi is a member of Kuwait’s Permanent National Committee on Human Rights and is deputy head of its Women and Work Affairs Committee. She has been a delegate and speaker at the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the UN’s 63rd Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63), the UN’s Universal Periodic Review on human rights (UPR), and the Human Rights Dialogue at the European Union.

Lisa Blaydes, Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development

Lisa Blaydes

Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is also Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018). 

Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Governance, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics

During the 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. During the 2015–2016 and 2023–2024 academic years, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

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