Une affaire de succès et d’échec ? Comprendre les trajectoires de réforme du statut juridique des femmes au Maroc et au Sénégal

Abstract

The article compares legal reforms of the status of women in Morocco and Senegal in order to understand what can enlighten their enactment in the first country and not in the other. In these two countries (and regions), which are rarely compared, the analysis of the activists’ itineraries and their interactions with those in government reveals striking similarities between the cases: the positioning of activists between the local and the global produced comparable effects, both on their relationship to feminism and on the choice of their modes of action, exposing them to similar challenges in the face of governments that tried at all costs to depoliticize the debates surrounding the reforms. However, the ability of Moroccan activists to step out of the field of expertise to protest in the streets allowed them to have much more weight in the arena of institutionalized politics. Moreover, the two regimes do not have the same religious resources with which to tackle the controversy. This also helps to explain the different outcomes of the mobilizations and its related paradox: an authoritarian situation may turn out to be more favorable to reform than a democracy.