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Social and cultural matters that were once considered largely domestic concerns increasingly have moved onto the international agenda. Religion, children’s rights, gender issues, education, drug- and sex-trafficking: these and other issues can have an impact far beyond national borders.
Religion
Matters of faith—specifically, Islam—became a central concern of foreign policy after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other extremists have said they are battling depraved infidels on behalf of devout Muslims. Their goal is to overthrow what they regard as corrupt Arab governments and to replace them with an Islamic caliphate.
U.S. officials have argued repeatedly the war on terrorism is not targeted at the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims but at a small subset of militants whose indiscriminant terror campaign violates Islamic principles. President Bush and others have regularly offered public gestures of respect toward Muslim traditions. Still, in Arab and Muslim communities, there are widespread suspicions—encouraged by al-Qaeda and other groups—that the administration’s counterterrorism strategy and the invasion of Iraq are partially motivated by U.S. animosity toward Islam. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in March named presidential adviser Karen Hughes undersecretary of state for public diplomacy; her priority is improving the United States’ image in the Islamic world.
Islam itself is subject to internal tensions. Sunnis and Shiites have been at odds since the seventh century. Within Shiism, there are two competing approaches to politics. One, the so-called quietest school, argues that clerics should not get involved in day-to-day affairs of government and instead should serve as an authority independent from politics. Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is a quietist. The other approach, epitomized by the Iranian regime, puts political control in the hands of religious leaders. In some Sunni Muslim countries—Saudi Arabia, for instance—a strict form of Islam dictates most aspects of life. Others—Turkey, Indonesia, Bosnia—are more secular.
The U.S. president, George W. Bush, is a devout, born-again Christian. Some of his political foes have charged that his religious beliefs dictate his foreign and domestic policy choices; the president and his defenders have repeatedly insisted they do not. Critics also say he injects a moralistic tone in many of his speeches and other public remarks. Bush’s speeches and public remarks often contain biblical imagery and expressions of faith, but this has long been true of U.S. presidential rhetoric.
U.S. Christian groups, some of which are strong supporters of the administration, have joined various foreign-policy debates. Evangelicals have appealed to the administration to fight international sex-trafficking and have pushed for a peace settlement to end the war between Christians in southern Sudan and the country’s Islamic-led government. They have also urged Washington to increase food aid to refugees in Sudan’s Darfur region and to consider dispatching U.S. troops to quell the fighting there, and have successfully pushed poverty-related issues higher on the administration’s foreign-policy agenda. Various U.S. and other religious groups have long been involved in campaigns to end poverty and oppression—including religious persecution—around the world.
Education
Widening access to education is one of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the international community’s action plan to attack global poverty. According to the United Nations, an estimated 114 million children in 2003 were not enrolled in school. The regions with the lowest enrollment: sub-Saharan Africa, south-central Asia, and western Asia. The goal is by 2015 that all boys and girls attend primary school.
The link between access to education and economic progress is clear. A particular focus of education advocates is increasing girls’ educational opportunities. In the last half-century, the regions that have most successfully closed gender gaps in education have also achieved the most economically and socially: eastern Asia, southeastern Asia, and Latin America. Conversely, regions with lagging growth—southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa—have also lagged in their investments in girls’ education. Others argue that the narrow educational offerings available to young men in some Arab Muslim nations made schools breeding grounds for anti-Western jihadis.
Women's Rights
The status of women around the world is another issue that is firmly on the international agenda. While women have made many gains since the first United Nations World Conference on Women was held in Mexico in 1975, they are still disproportionately affected by violence, poverty, inequality, and diseases like HIV/AIDS. Women make up 70 percent of those living on less than a dollar day worldwide; two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are female. Women around the world are at risk of violence from their partners; in Russia alone some 13,000 women are killed in domestic violence incidents every year. And women still earn less than men for the same work: The wage gap between men and women ranges from 10 percent to 60 percent worldwide.
Significant gender disparities continue to exist, and in some cases, to grow, in three regions: southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the constraints on women living in these areas—largely conservative, patriarchal practices, often reinforced by religious values—are increasingly recognized as a drag on development, empowering women is still considered a subversive proposition. In some societies, women’s rights are at the frontline of a protracted battle between religious extremists and those with more moderate, progressive views. Deep tensions are evident in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, for example, and to a lesser extent in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Their resolution is considered critical to progress, because research has shown that countries that suppress women are likely to stagnate economically, fail to develop democratic institutions, and become more prone to extremism.
Achieving gender equality is deemed so critical to reducing poverty and improving governance that it has become a development objective in its own right. The 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the international community’s action plan to attack global poverty, lists gender equality as one of its eight targets and considers women’s empowerment essential to achieving all of them. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that nothing is more important for development today than the economic, political, and social participation of women. Increasingly, women, who were long treated as passive recipients of aid, are now regarded as active promoters of change who can help society at large. And various studies specifically show that the benefits of promoting women are greatest when assistance focuses on increasing their education, their control over resources, and their political voice.
Promotion of women’s rights has caused a significant backlash in some quarters. Because the notion of female empowerment is often strongly associated with secularism and Western values, it has generated widespread resistance in certain societies, among both men and women. To appeal to religious conservatives, leaders throughout the Arab world have long given them significant influence over women, usually by letting them oversee family law and personal status codes. But as the recognition spreads that expanded rights for women lead to economic and political development, several young, Western-educated reformist leaders—King Mohamed VI of Morocco, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Sheik Hamad of Qatar—are reclaiming control over these areas. These leaders are engaged in the delicate exercise of pushing women forward without alienating their still highly conservative constituencies.
Laura Bush traveled to the Middle East in May to publicize programs aimed at empowering women. Women’s rights have been a prominent element of U.S. nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and a central motif of Washington’s project to promote democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policy-makers were instrumental in pushing for women’s rights in the new constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq; a third of the seats in Iraq’s new government are set aside for women. Days before Bush’s trip, Kuwait’s Parliament voted to grant women the right to vote and run for office in the 2007 elections.
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