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2010年9月 月次レポート（エルジュルディ・シリーン レバノン）
September's Report ITP/JSPS 2010
Shirine El Juldi
I decided to have a brief up of my fieldwork and about the experience I got during my four months stay in Lebanon in this report. There were many obstacles that I faced on a personal level and others that were due to the political and security issues in general. Dr Mbarak was of great help to make me understand the political issues in its different aspects at this point.
I was able to contact women in the political bureau of major political parties, though I wasn't able for some parties (mainly one). For them, it's not that they didn't want to collaborate with me on the topic; it's just that one of the parties thought that the subject might be sensitive at this critical period. Add to that, the escalation of political tension coined with the possibility of instability made the meeting impossible.
My main informants were a male and female from within the parliament committees. They were able to get me in contact with some secretary general of some political parties, or to women in charge of the women affairs within political parties. From there on, I was able to get to other interviewees. So it ended up with a snow ball approach.
Through them I was able to get in contact with women in the political bureau, and then upon finishing the interview, I could find that they were really excited, or let me put it in other terms "empowered" through my questions to start and re-think their participation, their feminist knowledge, at the women level in the party or with women in other political parties or at the grassroots levels. I was even offered a place in a political party, and I chose to be in the political bureau (just to show that perception of women joining is not restricted to men, there is a tendency among political parties to include women in their upper levels either by nomination or by elections
My informants were very excited about the topic. Each looked at it from different perspective, and accordingly helped in developing my data collection. Women in NGOs, especially those with women-focused dimension, stressed the importance of their work and the obstacles that they have to have in crossing the boundaries between the different political actors and the institutions.
Women in political parties were very helpful, they talked about women issues and political issues and stressed the fact that there are no legal obstacles to women's particpation; women should play a better role to be able to be politically represented.
Although my initial interest in the topic stemmed from an empowerment thinking approach of why Lebanese women were not able to reach decision making positions and why they have low participation at the political level, however, the indicators of empowerment and political participation differed from one context to another. It seemed to me, that one factor of women's low political participation is their low participation in the issues that have the "general public issue" concern and their concentration on all-inclusive gender issues which tends to be mainly put their activism within the "private sphere" didn't help much. Moreover, I found that the issues that women tackle, though are at the heart of political issues, yet, tend to be not part of the political debate that is occurring in Lebanon, ever since its creation.
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Lessons learned;
1- I knew later that I should not have approached women at key decision making levels at the beginning of my fieldwork. It would have been better to start it at grassroots and then would eventually reach them.
2- Realized the importance of the research and its significance in understanding and analyzing not only the status of women in Lebanon but also the core issue of the conflict and how women are actually tackling it.
3- The scarcity of material related to gender and women political participation in the libraries while much could only be found at the NGOs who work on such topic.
4- Importance of an academic research on women and political participation in Lebanon.
5- One of the most important things in developing a network between the researcher and his/her informants is trust, and I think I have earned it. The trust has to be built at the beginning of the session and to be fostered by the end.
6- For those who don't like to be recorded, I didn't record and took major notes.
7- Some of the informants didn't think that a personal background of their careers was necessary so I had to ask them the core questions and then went back in history, where I succeeded in getting the data I wanted.