Feb 17: Middle East Beyond Borders Workshop

I'm pleased to announce that the Middle East Beyond Borders workshop will meet next Tuesday, February 17th, from 6-7:30 in the Kresge room.

We will read and discuss Professor Kristen Stilt's paper "Constitutional Animals", abstract below. Professor Stilt is a professor of law at Harvard University and co-director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program. I look forward to a productive and lively discussion.

Dinner will be served.

As always, please come having read the paper in advance and RSVP to me or Bethany; email me for a copy of the paper.

Best wishes,
Mary Elston <melston@fas.harvard.edu>

Abstract:

"Constitutional Animals"

Attention to animal rights and welfare is growing worldwide.  The typical path of legal change is through legislation, regulation, and ballot initiatives.  Despite this growing attention to animals, very few countries provide protections for animals in their constitutions.  In 2014, Egypt joined this small club.  Its constitution requires the state to provide for “kind treatment of animals” (al-rifq bi-l-hayawan) in Article 45, which otherwise deals mainly with the environment.  A constitutional guarantee of animal welfare—for the animals’ own sake, and not limited to animals as resources for human use—seems unlikely in the Egyptian context. In world surveys of animal welfare, Egypt places very poorly, receiving, for example, an “F” on an “A” to “G” grading scale from the organization World Animal Protection in 2014.

This paper seeks to explain how the constitutional provision was adopted, and focuses on the strategies and arguments used by the Egyptian animal advocates who were instrumental in the process.  Conceptually, animal advocacy in Egypt stands at the intersection of two broad kinds of social movement framing, one relating to arguments used to advance the interests of animals in general and one relating to social movements working within a Muslim social and legal context such as Egypt. Based on primary and secondary sources, interviews, and participant observation, the paper identifies these two kinds of movements and shows how the Egyptian activists have navigated and used them in the constitutional context in particular.  The paper is a narrative account of the emergence of Article 45’s language and also, more broadly, an examination of how a social movement determines its frame of reference in a society where a broad range of arguments can be effective while at the same time arguments based in Islam have a particular relevance.