When family laws become tools of control: Why peace in MENA depends on equality at home

Imagine a crowded courtroom in Cairo, a woman waits for a judge to decide if she can end a marriage that has become her prison. She has proof of violence, but under Egypt’s personal status law, she must either forgo her financial rights or prove harm to be granted a divorce. Her struggle is not an anomaly; it is a system working exactly as designed.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), family laws are often regarded as sacred, being anchored in religion, culture, and tradition. Yet beneath this moral veneer lies a political truth rarely confronted: family laws have become one of the most enduring instruments of social and political control. By regulating love, marriage, and inheritance, these laws sustain hierarchies, and as feminists have long said, the personal is political, but in the MENA, it is also strategic.

Across many states in the region, laws that govern marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody are not only reflections of patriarchal norms, but they are mechanisms that keep both women and society in check. By regulating the most intimate aspects of life, regimes and ruling elites sustain systems of obedience that extend from the household to the state itself.

The politics hidden in the family

The first space where control is learned and enforced is the family itself.

Authoritarian control often begins in the home. A woman who is dependent on her husband or guardian for legal recognition, property ownership, or even mobility is less likely to claim public space or to challenge state authority.

In Egypt, women still face barriers to divorce and guardianship that confine them within patriarchal structures defended under the guise of “family stability.” Egypt’s personal status law limits women’s ability to initiate divorce unless they forgo financial rights or prove harm, and guardianship laws restrict mothers’ authority over children even after separation (Human Rights Watch, 2024). These legal frameworks align conveniently with state narratives that prize order over autonomy.

In Syria, patriarchal personal status laws predate the war, but the conflict has deepened their impact. As state institutions collapsed, women’s access to inheritance, custody, and legal protection weakened further. Reports from UNDP and feminist legal scholars show that many women remain unable to claim property or custody rights, leaving them economically and socially dependent in ways that reinforce broader mechanisms of social and legal control.

This fusion of law and politics reflects what Deniz Kandiyoti termed the patriarchal bargain; a survival pact within which women navigate restrictive systems at personal cost. In the MENA context, this bargain often serves state power as much as it sustains patriarchy. But in MENA’s authoritarian and conflict-affected states, this bargain serves not only patriarchy but the preservation of power itself. Women’s obedience at home mirrors the wider expectation of obedience to the state.

Family law as a barrier to peace

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda rests on a simple premise: peace is more sustainable when women participate fully in rebuilding societies. Yet across the MENA region, discriminatory family laws quietly undermine this vision.

In Yemen, women require male guardian approval for marriage, travel, or registering births, and custody laws transfer children to fathers once they reach certain ages. These restrictions, deepened by wartime displacement and Houthi-imposed mahram rules that require women to be accompanied by a male guardian (mahram) when travelling outside the home, thereby restricting their independent movement and access to services. Many Yemeni women who became heads of households due to conflict remain legally incapacitated to act on behalf of their families (Musawah, 2022; ReliefWeb, 2023).

In Libya, the breakdown of formal legal systems since 2011 has revived tribal adjudication, where male elders dominate dispute resolution. Women seeking inheritance, custody, or divorce often find themselves judged under customary law that prioritises male authority, leaving them without recourse to national courts (ESCWA, 2022). This resurgence of informal justice perpetuates structural exclusion long after the guns fall silent.

In Palestine, overlapping legal systems, Ottoman-era statutes, Jordanian laws, Israeli military orders, and Sharia courts create a labyrinth that women must navigate for even basic rights. In some communities, tribal practices override formal rulings, denying women equitable outcomes in divorce or inheritance. Legal fragmentation under occupation not only marginalises women privately but also silences them politically, because inconsistent and overlapping legal frameworks limit women’s ability to claim rights, participate in decision-making, or challenge discriminatory laws, while political authorities exploit these divisions to exclude women from formal and informal governance structures.

These examples demonstrate a common truth: when women cannot control their personal and economic lives, their contributions to peace and reconstruction are curtailed before they begin.

When humanitarian aid meets patriarchy

War may shatter borders and economies, but patriarchy often survives it intact and sometimes grows stronger.

Discriminatory family laws do not pause or vanish during war or crisis; they mutate. Humanitarian systems, too, can be complicit when they fail to challenge the patriarchal structures through which aid is delivered. In reality, gatekeepers often reinforce the inequalities they aim to address.

In Yemen, women’s access to aid is frequently mediated through male relatives or guardians, leaving widows and single mothers invisible in relief distribution systems (OCHA, 2024). In Libya, women displaced by fighting are often denied assistance because they lack property documents, records that remain registered under male family members. Such patterns reveal that gender-blind humanitarianism risks reproducing injustice rather than remedying it. As feminist scholars Carol Cohn and Sara Davies remind us, peacebuilding that ignores how law shapes power in the private sphere is peacebuilding built on sand.

The untapped potential of legal reform

Despite this grim landscape, there are glimmers of change. In Tunisia, fierce public debate over equal inheritance, sparked by the 2018 presidential initiative, demonstrated that reforming family law is possible within Islamic frameworks, even if the proposal has not yet been enacted. In Jordan, advocacy coalitions have successfully mobilised religious leaders to support tighter restrictions on child marriage, using faith-based arguments for equality.

Elsewhere, women-led organisations in Iraq and Lebanon have lobbied for greater female representation in peace councils and reconstruction efforts, linking gender-equal family law to social stability and economic recovery. These localised initiatives prove that cultural and religious contexts are not immovable barriers; they are sites of negotiation and transformation.

Indeed, women have refused silence within these constraining systems. Across the region, they have turned endurance into resistance, using faith, law, and activism to demand equality from within their own cultural contexts.

The Hurra Coalition, a regional alliance of feminist and legal organisations from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and beyond, has emerged as a driving force in transforming debate into action. Through rigorous legal research, strategic litigation, and coordinated media campaigns, it challenges discriminatory provisions in marriage, guardianship, and financial rights. With Equality Now acting as a catalyst, bringing partners together, grounding the work in feminist legal analysis, and supporting cross-country advocacy, the coalition has transformed isolated national struggles into a unified regional movement.

From Palestine to Bahrain, Hurra’s members are pushing for equitable division of marital property and shared guardianship. In Jordan and Morocco, they are confronting loopholes that permit child marriage under the guise of ‘exception.’ What unites them is not just a shared cause, but a commitment to transform entrenched family laws into models of justice and equality. By turning local struggles into a regional movement, Hurra shows that solidarity, not silence, is the region’s most powerful tool for reform.

But their work cannot, and should not, stand alone. For real change to take root, policymakers, faith leaders, and international partners must join hands with women-led movements like Hurra. Supporting their efforts means investing in legal reform, amplifying feminist expertise, and ensuring that equality within the family becomes a regional and global peace priority. The future of the MENA region’s stability depends on it.

Reimagining the WPS agenda

Twenty-five years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, it is time to confront a blind spot: the Women, Peace and Security agenda has largely treated the family as apolitical terrain. It champions women’s inclusion in parliaments and peace tables, but too often overlooks the domestic laws that determine whether they can even leave their homes. This omission is not benign; it is structural. By focusing on political participation while ignoring family law, the WPS framework risks reinforcing the same hierarchies that confine women to silence.

If a woman cannot own property, initiate divorce, or travel freely, her right to participate in peacebuilding remains symbolic and theoretical. Legal reform, therefore, must move from the periphery to the core of peace processes. The task ahead is not simply to insert women into existing peace processes but to dismantle the legal and cultural hierarchies that exclude them. This means engaging jurists, religious scholars, and policymakers to reinterpret family laws in light of equality and justice. Feminist thinkers like Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Hoda Elsadda remind us that reinterpreting family laws in light of justice is not a threat to faith; it is its fulfillment.

From the private to the political

True peace in MENA will not be born from power-sharing deals or donor-funded dialogues. It will emerge when the private sphere, the family, ceases to be a site of sanctioned inequality. Reforming family laws is not a “women’s issue”; it is a political imperative. Every peace process that ignores the home leaves patriarchy intact. Every constitution that enshrines male guardianship reproduces the logic of control.

Real peace begins where injustice begins, within the family. When women are equal in their homes, they will be equal in their nations. Reforming family law is not a cultural concession; it is the cornerstone of a just and peaceful MENA region.

Equality Now is working worldwide to eliminate sex discrimination in family law, including: campaigning for reforms to discriminatory family codes and personal status laws, supporting global and regional coalitions, including the Global Campaign for Equality in Family Law and the Hurra Coalition in the Middle East and North Africa, and providing legal expertise for drafting gender-equal model laws.