Throughout the last three decades, the Arab region has attracted the unwanted attention of the rest of the world because of its spiralling political upheaval. This unrest has caused migration, economic and cultural changes, and eventually a spring of revolutions and protests in demand of reform. Arab countries are now in the spotlight of global current affairs, and all the imperfections regarding their cultural, social, and gender inequalities have surfaced to the foreground. Arab women novelists have been addressing feminist issues for centuries, chipping away at the stereotypical image of the meek and voiceless Arab woman that comes hand in hand with Orientalism. Through their fiction, writers such as Nawal El Saadawi, Hanan Al- Shaykh and Fadia Faqir have promulgated a bold brand of Arab feminist thought. This interdisciplinary thesis explores the Greater Syrian and Egyptian woman's novel written between 1975 and 2007. Through the in-depth analysis of Arab women's novels available in English, I attempt to uncover the many reasons behind today's gender inequality in Greater Syria and Egypt. By examining contemporary Arabic narrative styles and cultivating traditional Arab story-telling methods, the creative element of this thesis uses fiction to expose social and political injustice. The novel within this thesis challenges different forms of patriarchy that are dominant in the region, and endeavours to document a historical, on-going revolution.

L’objet de cette thèse est de s’interroger sur l’accès des jeunes syriens aux nouvelles techniques d’information et de communication et sur les usages qu’ils en ont. Après avoir présenté la Syrie dans ses aspects démographiques, économiques, politiques et culturels et avoir souligné le retard du pays en matière d’accès aux NTIC, le texte aborde les grandes orientations de la sociologie des médias et de la communication et s’efforce de situer le débat entre déterminisme technologique et déterminisme socio-économique en l’inscrivant dans le cadre des efforts d’explication des révoltes arabes des années 2010 et 2011. Après avoir présenté les différentes thèses qui se sont affrontées à ce sujet en particulier à propos du rôle des réseaux socio-numériques simples accélérateurs de la circulation des informations pour les uns ou véritables instruments de la révolte pour les autres, le texte aborde la situation des NTIC en Syrie et l’usage qu’en font les jeunes d’abord à partir des informations quantitatives existantes puis à partir d’une enquête sur un échantillon de jeunes syriens contactés par internet. La thèse analyse leur mode d’accès à internet et aux réseaux sociaux et les usages qu’ils en font ainsi que du téléphone mobile en comparaison avec les médias classiques qu’ils délaissent de plus en plus. Après avoir mis en lumière les difficultés d’accès à internet, le sous équipement du pays en matière d’informatique et de connexion ainsi que les fractures qui existent entre les générations, les sexes et les différentes aires géographiques, la thèse conclue que ce qui attire les jeunes vers les réseaux socio-numériques comme source d’information est lié au discrédit et à la méfiance vis-à-vis des médias classiques contrôlés par le régime ou idéologisés par diverses puissances régionales. Mais dans le contexte de guerre que connaît le pays, les informations circulant sur les réseaux sont de plus en plus idéologisés, reflétant les fractures confessionnelles et ethniques de la société syrienne. Les jeunes en font donc un usage avant tourné vers le divertissement pour oublier la tragique réalité quotidienne. / This thesis will describe and analyze how young Syrian people could use the new techniques of information and communication. Firstly it describes the main characteristic of Syria on demographic economic political and cultural points of view. It underlines how the country has lately discovered the new technologies of communication in comparison with other Arabic countries. Then it presents the evolution of the sociology of mass media and communication and the main trends concerning the explication of the role of the web as a factor provoking the Arabic revolutions in 2010 and 2011. The text analyzes after the situation of the NTIC in Syria using quantitative information coming from different national and international reports. Then it presents the results of an inquiry organized through the web concerning a hundred or young Syrians who have answered to a large panel of opened or closed questions about the way they can use computers, web navigation and cellular phones. It underlines the differences between the generations, the genders and the different areas rural or urban concerning the use of the NTIC. The interest young people show for these techniques as a source of information is linked to the defiance concerning official media narrowly controlled by the regime. However, social networks in the context of the Syrian civil war trend to reinforce the religious and ethnic conflicts and young people use them essentially for leisure to forget the violence.

The goal of this study is to generate a more holistic picture of the diffusion and assimilation of universal human rights norms in diverse cultural and political settings such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The overarching question to be investigated in this thesis is the relationship between the evolving international human rights regime and the emerging human rights normative and legal culture in the Middle East. This question will be investigated in detail with reference to regional human rights schemes such as the Arab Charter of Human Rights, as well as local human rights developments in three Middle Eastern states, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having gauged the take-up of human rights norms on the ground at the local and regional levels, the thesis examines in full the extent of socialisation and internalisation of human rights norms across the Middle East region at large.

This sociological study explores the past and current higher education (HE) experience of educationalists at Gaza’s universities and how this experience may be evolving in the shifting socio-political context in the Arab World. The thesis is motivated by three questions: 1. What are the perspectives of academic staff in the Faculties of Education at Gaza’s universities on their own past HE experiences? 2. What are the perspectives of students and their lecturers (academic staff) in the Faculties of Education at Gaza’s universities on students’ current HE experiences? 3. How do educationalists in the Faculties of Education at Gaza’s universities perceive the shifting socio-political context in the Arab World, and what current or future impact do they think it will have on the education context at Gaza’s universities? To examine these questions, I conducted an inductive qualitative study. Using 36 in-depth, semi- structured interviews which lasted between (90-300 min), I collected data from educationalists (15 academic staff; 21 students) at two of Gaza’s universities. Due to difficulties of access to the Gaza Strip, the participants were interviewed via Skype from Cambridge. Informed by the literature review, and triangulated with other research activities, such as reviewing participants’ CVs, browsing universities websites, and keeping a reflective journal, a thematic analysis was conducted on the interview data. Theoretically, although this study has benefited from conceptual insights, such as those found in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and in Pierre Bourdieu’s work on symbolic violence, it is a micro-level study, which is mainly data driven. The findings of this research show that in the past, educationalists were relatively more passive in terms of shaping their HE experiences, despite efforts to become resilient. In the present, students and their lecturers continue to face challenges that impact negatively on their participation and everyday life at Gaza’s universities. However, how the HE experience will evolve out of this context in the future is uncertain. The Arab Spring revolutions have had an influence on Gaza HE institutions’ campuses as they have triggered more awareness of students’ grievances and discontent. Because of some political and educational barriers, however, students’ voices are a cacophony; they remain split between “compliance” and resistance (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 471; Swartz, 2013, p. 39). Previously, Sara Roy (1995) rightly indicated a structure of “de-development” in the Gaza Strip (p.110). The findings from this research show that the impact of occupation and of the changes in the Arab World on the educational context in Gaza are more complex than previously thought. There is a simultaneous process of construction and destruction that is both external and internal to educationalists and which undermines academic work at Gaza’s universities. Based on this, the study concludes by explaining six implications of this complex structure for academic practice at Gaza’s universities, offering nine policy recommendations for HE reform, and highlighting six areas for future research.