The media have power: they create frames of conceptions, influence attitudes and behaviour, and monitor the conduct of government officials. For women, the media can suggest ways and means to defend civil rights and gain access to society’s resources and opportunities. Indeed, Media Development offers three levels of interventions to promote gender equality. (1) Increasing female number and roles in the media labour markets. (2) Promoting the production and circulation of content that challenge stereotypical portrayals of women and men. (3) Addressing the entire society to raise awareness and commitment for equal contributions in sustainable development. However, even though media development efforts have been popular during the last two decades in the global South (UNESCO), the Arab region is ranked the lowest in the world for achieving gender equality (CRS, 2020).  This project aims to investigate the role of media development to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through a case study of two gender strategies driven by two main models of media development (Scott, 2014; Manyozo, 2012), in the Arab region. One is led by external interventions, the other is supported by domestic authorities and local governments. The time period of the research is limited to the last decade, which has seen radical changes in terms of women’s participation in the public sphere.  The findings are based on 10 in-depth interviews with media professionals directly involved in these strategies across different Arab countries, from Algeria, Iraq, and Palestine, to the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Despite the differences between the strategies in terms of political affiliations and territories of interest, the interviews show that gender (in)equality in the media is not a phenomenon isolated from people’s daily lives. Correspondingly, women’s empowerment is the result of different power struggles in society in which media development could potentially make a real difference if based on gendered pluralistic participatory approaches, which include the internal and external environments of media organisations, as well as all actors of society’s systems and structures.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre de l'économie de développement, et tente de traiter la question de blocage économique dans la région arabe, une situation qui a longtemps marqué cette zone. Nous proposons une nouvelle carde d'analyse qui adopte la notion de l'économie fondée sur la connaissance (EFC), qui a été élaboré par la Banque Mondiale, dans laquelle cette économie est composée de quatre piliers, a savoir : incitation économique et régime institutionnel, éducation et ressources humaines, Système d'innovation et l'infrastructure d'information (TIC). La thèse emploie le concept de l'EFC afin d'inspecter, d'analyser et d'évaluer la situation économiques dans les pays arabes depuis l'indépendance et jusque la veille des révolutions arabes, nommé : le printemps arabe. A travers de cette thèse nous élaborons plusieurs types d'analyse, et à la fin de thèse nous proposons un modèle économétrique permettant l'évaluation de la contribution de la connaissance à la croissance et au développement dans ces pays. / This thesis is part of the economics of development. It addresses the issue of the economic morass in which the Arab region has been mired for decades. We suggest a new analytical framework that builds upon the concept of knowledge-based economies and its four pillars – economic incentive and institutional regime, education and human resources, innovation system, and, finally, information infrastructure (ICT) - as conceived by the World Bank. Our thesis mobilizes this concept of knowledge-based economies in order to analyze and evaluate the state of the economy in the Arab region from the independence period to the eve of the revolution in Arab countries ' Arab spring'. Throughout the thesis, we develop several types of analysis and we conclude with an econometric model, that assesses the contribution of knowledge to growth and development in the Arab region.