Gender and Nationalism in Serbia: The impact of political ideology on women's human rights

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Region: Southeastern Europe, grade: 1.5, University of Bologna (and University of Sarajevo), language: English, abstract: [...] Reproductive and labour rights of women are of interest because they are mutually linked and reinforcing. Firstly, it is through reproduction policies and rhetoric that women are limited to their role in preserving the continuance of the nation. In turn, this serves the benefit of the demographic policies of ethnocracies. It is important to note that it is through these policies that hierarchical and patriarchal structures are reinforced. As a logical consequence, this is supposed to have an impact on the enjoyment of women's labour rights because following this argumentation, it is not in the interest of ethnocracies to involve women equally to men into paid labour but rather to reinforce their primary task of reproduction by discriminating them through certain policies related to the labour market. This is why the aim of this research is to analyse how these specific politics and policies related to reproduction and labour have affected the enjoyment of certain women's human rights. Therefore I will first review certain policies and politics of religious and nationalistic leaders to point out what initiatives they have undertaken in regards to women's reproductive rights. Moreover the thesis will elaborate the enjoyment of women's social, economic rights and cultural rights, such as labour rights (art.6 CESCR) and the right to family life (art.10 CESCR) that are set in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 1966. Thus, it will be of interest to see how women's participation in the labour market has developed within the framework of changing political ideology and whether we can see significant developments not only for the question of whether women are being employed but also about which types of labour women are carrying out. [...]