Deniz Kandiyoti

Deniz Kandiyoti (born 15 March 1944) is an author and an academic of research in the fields of gender relations and developmental politics in the Middle East, specifically Turkey. She holds a PhD from London School of Economics.

Her work on gender and Islam, especially in post-colonial and rural development areas, has been influential throughout the entire field. She has pioneered new research into understanding the implications of Islam and state policy on women, and as a result has brought more attention to the field.

As of 2010, Kandiyoti is Emeritus Professor in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London, where she began working in 1992. She has done consultancy work for United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

Early life and education Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Kandiyoti holds British and Turkish citizenships. She received a Bachelor of Arts from University of Paris in 1966 and a Master of Science in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics before receiving her PhD there as well.

Career and research Kandiyoti's early work focused on political economy and rural transformation, but then moved towards gender, nationalism and Islam. Most recently, her research has “returned to exploring the politics of gender in Muslim-majority societies but from an even broader comparative perspective” which involves Afghanistan and Uzbekistan as well as Turkey. She is also the editor of the journal Central Asian Survey, “the only established peer reviewed, multi-disciplinary journal in the world concerned with the history, politics, cultures, religions and economies of the Central Asian and Caucasian regions.” Kandiyoti's current project is entitled “Islam and the Politics of Gender.”

Publications

As part of a series entitled “Women in a World Perspective”, Kandiyoti “illustrates different patterns of women’s participation in rural production systems through a comparative analysis of cases from Africa, Asia, Latin America the Middle East and North Africa” (preface).

This article, published at a time where Islamic gender studies were rare and the field was nascent, caused notoriety. Since writing this article, Kandiyoti herself has critiqued it, calling it an “analytically flawed piece” (Hammami, 2006, pg 1350). She attributed the success of this article to an “ instant recognition of the phenomena [she] was describing, especially on the part of [her] colleagues in the South, who knew, almost intuitively, what [she] was talking about” (Hammami, 2006, pg 1350).

This book, a compilation of case studies regarding Islamic states and their histories with women. The book argues “that an adequate analysis of the position of women in Muslim societies must be grounded in a detailed examination of the political projects of contemporary states and of their historical transformations” (pg 2).

This paper reviews and evaluates policies directed at rural women in the Third World, as reflected in Women in development (WID) research and policy documents.