The research, conducted by Zuhriddin Juraev of Kokand University and Chonnam National University together with Makhfuzakhon Shamsieva, Boburmirzo Khursanaliyev and Shakhodatkhon Okhunjonova, offers a systematic comparison of eight post-Soviet states over the period from 2015 to 2019. Rather than relying on case narratives alone, the team assembled quantitative indicators for each country, including levels of urbanisation, female labour force participation and fertility, drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. To capture the dependent variable of interest, the authors coded feminist mobilisation on a zero-to-two ordinal scale, distinguishing between the absence of organised feminist advocacy, limited or episodic activity, and sustained movement presence. The coding decisions and derived data are documented in an appendix and compiled from open-access NGO registries, human rights reports and published sources.

The analytical result is striking in its consistency: the structural variables that modernisation theory treats as engines of feminist politics simply do not predict feminist mobilisation in this region. Countries with similar levels of urbanisation and female employment diverge sharply in the strength of their feminist movements, while some states with high economic participation of women show almost no organised feminist advocacy at all. The disconnect held across the 2015 to 2019 window, a period that included both economic growth and political tightening across much of the post-Soviet space. In statistical terms, neither modernisation nor economic participation emerged as a reliable predictor of feminist political outcomes, a finding that challenges decades of theorising that treats women’s paid work as a structural precondition for collective gender politics.

To explain this pattern, the authors turn to the concept of the moral economy, a framework with roots in the work of Karl Polanyi and later elaborated by scholars such as William Booth and Andrew Sayer. A moral economy, in this sense, is the set of shared normative expectations that governs how economic activity is valued and justified. In many post-Soviet societies, the study argues, women’s labour is embedded in a moral economy that frames work as duty rather than entitlement. Women work because the household needs the income, because socialist-era norms of the working mother persist, or because family obligation demands it, not because employment is understood as a basis for individual rights or political claims. Work performed as duty generates wages, but it does not generate the sense of grievance and entitlement from which feminist movements historically draw their energy.

This distinction between work as duty and work as entitlement carries significant theoretical weight. Classic accounts, including Inglehart and Norris’s work on gender equality and cultural change, have treated rising female employment as a solvent of traditional gender attitudes, gradually producing demands for political equality. The post-Soviet evidence suggests instead that the same observable behaviour, paid employment, can be sustained by very different normative logics in different societies. Nancy Fraser’s analysis of the contradictions between capitalism and care, along with scholarship on moral economies of care by Linda McDowell and colleagues, supports the idea that the political meaning of women’s work depends on the institutional and cultural framing that surrounds it. Where employment is framed as contribution to family survival, it may even reinforce rather than erode traditional gender expectations, leaving little discursive space for feminist claims-making.

The second mechanism the study identifies is political regulation. Drawing on the civil society literature, including the USAID Civil Society Organization Sustainability Index and Freedom House’s Nations in Transit reports, the authors document the administrative constraints under which women’s organisations operate across the region. Feminist advocacy is further constrained by state regulation and administrative repression, ranging from restrictive NGO registration regimes and burdensome reporting requirements to the surveillance and harassment of activists. Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow’s work on the political context of social movements underscores that movements do not arise simply because grievances exist; they require political opportunities, and in authoritarian or hybrid regimes those opportunities are systematically closed. The study’s two-mechanism framework therefore links moral economy and political regulation together, arguing that each suppresses feminist mobilisation through a distinct pathway: one by hollowing out the normative foundations of feminist claims, the other by criminalising or exhausting the organisational forms those claims would take.

The framework also engages a long-standing debate in postsocialist gender studies. Scholars such as Barbara Einhorn, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, and Kristen Ghodsee have documented how the transition from state socialism reshaped gender regimes, with the privatisation of social care pushing responsibility for welfare back onto families and onto women in particular. Maxine Molyneux’s earlier work on family reform in socialist states highlighted how socialist governments mobilised women’s labour while carefully managing the political implications of women’s emancipation. The new study extends this lineage by arguing that the post-Soviet present should not be read as a transitional stage on the way to Western-style feminist politics. Instead, the authors treat the absence of organised feminist advocacy as an institutionally produced condition, a stable outcome generated by the interaction of moral economies and political regulation, rather than a delay in an expected developmental sequence.

The methodological choices reflect the difficult research environment in which such work is conducted. As Nicholas Koch has noted, field research in authoritarian contexts demands particular care, and the authors state that their study involved no interviews or human participants, relying entirely on publicly available secondary materials. In interpreting politically sensitive documents, they took care to avoid identifying specific individuals or organisations in ways that could not be verified through open sources, an approach designed to protect activists operating under repressive conditions. The quantitative indicators are publicly accessible, and the supplementary materials, including the coding of feminist mobilisation for each country, are available alongside the article, allowing other researchers to scrutinise and extend the analysis. The research received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests.

The implications extend well beyond the post-Soviet region. Recent scholarship on anti-gender politics, including work by Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Graff and Johanna Kantola, and on authoritarian gender regimes by Sylvia Walby, suggests that feminist movements worldwide face intensifying state hostility and ideological contestation. If the post-Soviet case demonstrates that economic modernisation provides no automatic foundation for feminist politics, then activists, funders and policymakers who assume that development programmes will organically produce gender-equality movements may be operating on flawed premises. The study suggests instead that supporting feminist mobilisation requires attention to the moral framings that give women’s work its meaning, and to the political openings that allow grievance to become organisation. Where work is framed as duty and advocacy is framed as subversion, neither rising employment nor rising incomes will do the political work that theory once promised.

For the comparative politics of gender, the study’s contribution lies in its refusal to treat absent feminist movements as a puzzle to be explained by deficiency. By specifying two mechanisms, moral economy and political regulation, and by operationalising them across eight countries with transparent coding, the authors convert a regional anomaly into a testable framework with broader purchase. The finding that women’s labour force participation coexists with weak feminist mobilisation is not an exception to be managed but a signal that the relationship between economic structure and political consciousness is mediated by institutions, norms and state power. As debates over gender, authoritarianism and civil society intensify globally, the post-Soviet experience offers a sobering empirical lesson: the road from the workplace to the movement is neither short nor automatic, and it can be blocked at either end.

Subject of Research: The relationship between women's economic participation, moral economy, state regulation and feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article Title: Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article References: Juraev, Z., Shamsieva, M., Khursanaliyev, B., & Okhunjonova, S. (2026). Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Keywords: feminist mobilisation, post-Soviet societies, moral economy, modernisation theory, women's labour, gender politics, civil society, authoritarianism, social movements, political repression, comparative analysis, gender regimes

The trial enrolled 114 women drawn from approximately 20 villages across the Chouf region, an area whose residents have contended with continuing economic instability, political unrest and environmental challenges in recent years. Researchers from Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, randomly assigned participants either to learn the Transcendental Meditation technique or to an active control group that received weekly videos on self-development and well-being. The use of an active control condition matters methodologically: rather than comparing meditators against people receiving nothing, the design allowed the team to compare the effects of learning the meditation technique against participation in another structured activity explicitly aimed at self-improvement, strengthening the case that the observed changes were attributable to the practice itself rather than to attention, expectation or the passage of time.

Participants in the meditation group were instructed to practice for 20 minutes twice a day, sitting comfortably with their eyes closed. Adherence proved remarkably high for a community-based trial. Sixty percent of the women reported practicing twice daily every day or most days, 18 percent practiced once a day, and 20 percent practiced irregularly. No harmful events related to participation were reported during the study period. The researchers say this combination of high adherence and an absence of adverse events is notable, particularly given that the participants were navigating daily lives shaped by chronic stressors rather than volunteering from a leisure-rich, low-stress population.

After three months, the meditation group outperformed the control group on all four outcome measures. Happiness showed the largest change of the four. Women practicing the technique reported increases in happiness at both the one-month and three-month assessments. The control group followed a different trajectory: a small improvement at one month, followed by a marked decrease at three months. The researchers suggest this divergence is meaningful because it indicates that the benefits of the meditation practice did not merely fade or plateau but appeared to consolidate over the study period, while the initial boost seen in the control condition reversed by the end of follow-up.

The statistical analysis also probed which factors were most closely tied to happiness. The team found that self-efficacy and perceived stress were both significantly related to happiness levels, and in their model self-efficacy emerged as the strongest predictor, followed by perceived stress. Together, the two variables accounted for 42 percent of the variance in happiness, a substantial share for psychological research of this kind. Self-efficacy, defined as a person’s perception of their ability to achieve desired results through their own actions, increased over the three months in the meditation group while decreasing in the control group. The researchers argue that this pairing of rising self-efficacy and falling perceived stress is particularly important because both variables were independently linked to happiness in their analysis, pointing to a plausible mechanism through which the practice may exert its effects.

Marie Loiselle, PhD, principal investigator and a researcher in the Department of Maharishi Vedic Science at Maharishi International University, emphasized the strength of the trial’s methods and the breadth of its results. She described the study as significant given its randomized controlled design and the statistically significant changes observed on every measure, noting that it is very encouraging because the women improved across several dimensions of psychological well-being at the same time. In her view, the results suggest that Transcendental Meditation may offer these women an additional way to cope with the significant pressures they face in daily life. Frederick Travis, PhD, who served as statistician and senior advisor on the study, highlighted the same two variables from a different angle. He said the improvements in self-efficacy and the reductions in perceived stress are particularly important because both were related to happiness in the analysis, adding that the findings provide a basis for further research into approaches that may help people cope with persistent environmental stress.

The choice of population was deliberate. The researchers note that women in Lebanon can face multiple, overlapping sources of stress, including economic instability, political unrest, environmental problems and gender inequality. Previous research has also identified cultural and social barriers that may discourage some people from seeking professional help for stress and related psychological difficulties, meaning that low-barrier, self-administered practices could fill a gap where conventional mental health services are difficult to access or socially stigmatized. The trial itself grew out of a community program: the researchers worked in collaboration with the Ladies Foundation for Pure Knowledge, which was nearing the end of a project to teach Transcendental Meditation to approximately 1,000 women in the Chouf region. The foundation approached the research team to investigate whether the practice was producing measurable benefits among the women learning it, turning an ongoing outreach effort into an opportunity for rigorous evaluation.

Susan Hamza, the foundation’s director, reflected on the scale of the response among participants in the broader teaching project. She said that so many of the participants told her their life had been transformed in many ways that words could not even begin to describe, and that those involved in realizing the project have her deep gratitude. Such testimonies are, by themselves, anecdotal, but the trial’s quantitative results give that community enthusiasm an empirical footing: the measured changes in happiness, resilience, self-efficacy and perceived stress among the 114 trial participants aligned with the direction of the reports coming out of the larger teaching program.

The study was approved by the Maharishi International University Research Institute Review Board and registered with the U.S. Clinical Trials Registry under identifier NCT05836129. Funding was provided by the Ladies Foundation of Pure Knowledge in Lebanon and by individual donors, and the authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. The research method was classified as a randomized controlled trial, and the subject population consisted of people rather than clinical samples recruited through hospitals, which the authors present as a strength when studying well-being in community settings.

The investigators are careful to frame the findings as a beginning rather than a conclusion. Of the 114 women who enrolled, 83 completed both posttests, and participants were followed for only three months, leaving open questions about durability and about whether the effects would hold in larger and more diverse samples. The team recommends future studies with six- or 12-month follow-up periods and larger populations in Lebanon and potentially elsewhere in the Middle East, where chronic, population-level stressors are common and scalable, low-cost interventions for psychological resilience are in short supply. If the results are confirmed, the researchers suggest, a technique that requires no equipment, no clinical setting and only 40 minutes a day could become a practical complement to existing efforts to support mental well-being in communities under sustained pressure. Transcendental Meditation itself is described by its practitioners as a simple, natural technique that does not involve concentration, control of the mind, contemplation or monitoring of thoughts or breathing, and that allows the active thinking mind to settle into a state of inner calm, characteristics that may help explain both the high adherence observed in the trial and the feasibility of extending the approach to other stressed populations.

Subject of Research: Effects of Transcendental Meditation on psychological well-being in rural Lebanese women

Article Title: Randomized trial finds Transcendental Meditation improves happiness, resilience and self-efficacy in rural Lebanese women

Article References: Randomized trial finds Transcendental Meditation improves happiness, resilience and self-efficacy in rural Lebanese women. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Transcendental Meditation, randomized controlled trial, Lebanon, rural women, happiness, resilience, self-efficacy, perceived stress, mental health, Women's Health journal, Maharishi International University, psychological well-being