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Niels Spierings

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Year of Publication: 2020

Glas, Saskia ; Spierings, Niels, Changing Tides? On How Popular Support for Feminism Increased After the Arab Spring, In Double-Edged Politics on Women’s Rights in the MENA Region. Gender and Politics, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131-154

The authors studied the impact of feminism in some Arab countries following the Arab Spring uprising across North Africa in 2011. They assessed the specific forms of the uprisings. They also examined whether pre-existing anti-Western value and gender relations influenced the visibility and resonance of feminist norms. 

Year of Publication: 2019

Glas, Saskia ; Spierings, Niels, Support for feminism among highly religious Muslim citizens in the Arab region, European Journal of Politics and Gender, Vol. 2, no. 2, 2019, pp. 283-310

Public opinion studies argue that in Middle Eastern and North African countries, Muslims support gender equality less than non-Muslims. This overlooks the diversity in religion–feminism relations. This paper argues that religious Muslims who support feminism are disregarded, even though in-depth studies have repeatedly pointed to their existence. The authors provide a large-scale analysis of support for Muslim feminism. Conducting latent class analyses on 64,000 Muslims in 51 Middle Eastern and North African contexts, they find that a substantial one in five Arab Muslims combines high attachment to Islam with support for feminism.
Spierings, Niels, Democratic Disillusionment? Desire for Democracy after the Arab Spring, International Political Science Review, 2019

This article examines the impact of the uprisings on popular attitudes, using 45 public opinion surveys across the region to test his theoretical framework of a consequence-based approach that includes the concept of deprivation. When the data are combined to provide a country by country analysis they suggest that countries like Egypt and Morocco where initial protest had rapid political results but failed in the longer term, disillusionment was highest. Conversely a lack of major protest (Algeria) or of initial reform (Yemen) maintained desire for democracy.  Results for Lebanon and Tunisia showed very different respomnses from different groups in society: Sunnia in Lebanon and the very poor in Tunisia.