The work on this book has been carried along by two major concerns. One is about politics – in particular politics of gender and development – the other is about conceptualizations. The two concerns are closely interlinked. First on politics. As pointed out in several chapters, most explicitly in Chapter 5, political approaches to issues of women and gender have been characterized by continuities rather than radical breaks, all the way from the days of Frelimo socialism in the 1970s and early 1980s to the days of World Bank hegemony from the 1990s onwards. This is one step: to realize that in spite of remarkable changes, from a centralized socialist economy to a neo-liberal one, approaches to women and gender have remained much the same. The next step is to investigate the basic assumptions of these approaches. This is where conceptualizations come into the picture. As discussed in several chapters (Chapters 4, 10 and 11 among them) even simple concepts like ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘gender’ are far from innocent; they are rooted in often quite tenacious taken-for-granted assumptions revolving around notions of male dominance/female subordination.

A major line of argument in the book is that such assumptions do not fit realities very well, certainly not realities in northern Mozambique, and that – very simply – gender relations should be investigated, not assumed. The political implication of this argument is that policies, which are not rooted in and responding to the actual lives and concerns of men and women, are not likely to have success.