Peoples’ revolutions and uprisings across multiple Arab countries have carried aspirations and demands for political democratization as well as social and economic justice. It also brought forward complex questions tackling the interface between political governance, social and economic policies, and peoples’ right to development.

Yet, fostering national leadership that prioritizes national public interest based on democratic and developmental visions and strategies remain a challenge in the Arab countries. Moreover, it is evident that within today’s global economic governance, there is a threat of reducing the meaning of democracy to electing representatives who are compelled to pursue the same social and economic policies irrespective of their ideological affiliations. This context carries multiple challenges to reclaiming citizenship and democracy in the Arab countries and complicates the possibilities for a clash down on spaces for people to draw up new economic and social realities.

Civil society organizations along with labor groups and movements have been actively addressing these challenges.

Join the session for a reflection on this context, and discussion with colleagues from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Arab NGO Network for Development regarding the demands advanced by civil society groups and movements in the Arab region.

Speakers:
Mahinour El-Badrawi is a researcher at the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR), a Human Rights organization working through research, litigation and advocacy on promoting social and economic rights. El-Badrawi is Program Officer of the International Financial Institutions’ Monitoring and Foreign Debt programs at the Center’s Research Unit. She is also responsible for the Center’s partnership with the “Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debt” campaign, doing advocacy and Socio-economic Research. Before that, she worked as a researcher for the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, specializing in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Kinda Mohamadieh is policy advisor at the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND), where she works on social and economic rights, development policies, trade and investment policies, and other globalization and governance issues. She is currently based at the South Centre in Geneva where she researches investment policy and treaties, and World Trade Organization agreements, with a focus on the Arab region.

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