Women’s Rights in the Middle East: A Longitudinal Study of Kuwait 1 Mary Ann Te ´treault Trinity University Katherine Meyer The Ohio State University AND Helen Rizzo The American University in Cairo This research identifies structural, cultural, and dynamic elements oper- ating in the campaign for women’s rights in Kuwait. Using data from multiple sources, it focuses on the main characteristics and patterns of activism starting from the Gulf War of 1990–1991, paying particular attention to its growth and decline during the 1990s, an understudied period in the literature on women’s movements in the Middle East. Our findings underscore the embeddedness of the struggle for women’s rights in political development generally, and add to the understanding of social movements and their evolution in non-Western contexts. The women’s movement in developed countries may have seen a decline in recent years, but its growth is evident in the international expansion of women’s organizations and the dissemination of feminist culture globally (Staggenborg and Taylor 2005). Women’s rights remain prominent political and social issues across the Middle East, and are attracting increasing participation by women. The development and growth of women’s organizations, public debates orga- nized by women (and those that include female participants), and women’s increased access to the media, have all supported women’s participation in civil society (Moghadam and Sadiqi 2006). Despite the importance of women’s rights in current discourse on the Middle East, little research traces the evolution of activities related to them in the region, particularly during the key period of the 1990s when optimism about democratiza- tion elsewhere was commonplace. Moghadam (2000) indicates that such inatten- tion was evident in social movement research which seldom dealt either with non- Western social movements or with women’s involvement in movements generally. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., al-Mughni 2001), we find that the literature on 1 Research for this paper was funded by National Science Foundation grant number 0527339, ‘‘AOC: Collaborative Research: The Dissent ⁄ Repression Nexus in the Middle East,’’ and by the Mershon Center at Ohio State University. Ó 2009 International Studies Association International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 218–237