A Roundtable on Israel and Genocide in Gaza
That, plus Adam Shatz on Fanon, three APSR articles and more in the MENA Academy Weekly Roundup #18
Welcome to this week’s MENA Academy Weekly Roundup. Posting has been light this week; it’s been a busy week at Chez Aardvark, with the happy arrival home of our little cub (hooray!). It’s been a busy week in the Middle East, what with the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, the escalating conflict over Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping in support of Gaza, and so much more. I am hoping to have a “state of the Middle East’s interlocking crises” article out soon, to try to make sense of it all.
Last week, the podcast featured the brilliant Adam Shatz in a wide ranging conversation about his biography of Frantz Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic. It’s really a fantastic book, combining careful biography with a sophisticated and close reading of Fanon’s actual texts. Shatz has been engaging with how to think about decolonization and Middle Eastern conflicts for a long time; his essay “Writers and Missionaries” continues to be one of the favorite texts assigned in my Middle East Studies scope and methods cornerstone class. As it happens, I read Shatz’s new book in the midst of planning and then helping to run a fabulous POMEPS workshop in collaboration with CEMAT in Tunisa on the legacies and relevance of Fanon for the Middle East today. I will therefore hold back my thoughts on the book and on the broader questions raised by Fanon until the publication of that collection of essays in a few months. For now, enjoy the podcast:
Perhaps the most important development in the Middle East last week was the International Court of Justice hearing of South Africa’s case alleging Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. In my view, the case presented and the finding by the judges were as devastating as Gaza’s war itself. The focus in the post-ruling spin battles over their not calling for a ceasefire was utterly misguided. No judicial call for a ceasefire was going to affect Israeli actions. The importance of the hearing was the meticulous presentation of the nearly incomprehensible scope and scale of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s physical and human geography, the irreversible erasure of a captive population with nowhere to flee, and the bewildering torrent of statements of intent by Israeli officials and politicians. Whether or not this meets the standard of genocide, it clearly has involved massive war crimes and ethnic cleansing which will stain the world’s conscience and change global views of Israel for a long time to come.
To contextualize that, this week’s roundup begins with a symposium in the Journal of Genocide Research on Gaza and the question of genocide. The standout essay is by the longtime scholar of political violence Ugur Umit Ungor, “Screaming, Silence, and Mass Violence in Israel/Palestine.” Ungor calls for scholars to step away from the white hot public argumentation, and focuses on two main pathologies of the discourse: “selective indignation bordering on moral inconsistency, and decontextualization of Israel/Palestine from Middle Eastern history.”
Other essays include Elyse Semerdjian’s “A World Without Civilians,” which notes with cold fury that “as the civilian/combatant distinction has collapsed, and given the scale of civilian destruction, it appears the distinction between the targeted bombing promised by “humane war” and indiscriminate bombing has largely vanished. Since everything from taking shelter in hospitals or fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding, the entire civilian population has been transformed into a legal target.”
That logic is taken up in another way by Shmuel Lederman, “Gaza as Laboratory 2.0,” which provocatively argues: “Paradoxically, it is the lack, rather than the existence of genocidal intent in Israel's actual war conduct that is instructive in terms of the kind of genocidal violence it reflects. Clearly, the war strategy that Israel has been pursuing can be carried out only when the general mindset is that Palestinian lives are completely expendable. It is surely an extreme, yet familiar pattern of what Moses has called “liberal” permanent security, where civilians are framed as legitimate collateral damage of a justified war against brutal enemies even when they are killed en masse. The focus on the genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, understandable as it is, obscures the way Gaza is a laboratory, namely a condensed and particularly brutal case study of the kind of violence that is more commonly ignored, downplayed or legitimized, including by genocide scholars, as long it does not rise to the “level” of genocide.”
Other essays include Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s “The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza”, Mark Levene’s “Gaza 2023: Words Matter, Lives Matter More”, and Zoe Samudzi’s “‘We are Fighting Nazis’: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) after October 7.” Check out the whole thing. Debates about the meaning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the future of international law and the possibility of justice are urgent, necessary, and only the beginning.
Now on to the rest of the roundup: we have not one, not two, but three outstanding MENA focused articles in the American Political Science Review (on Iraq, Sudan, and gender representation), a fascinating exploration of the “space race” in the Middle East, and an open access study of local government and elections in Turkey. I’ll be back next week with more!
Kristen Kao, Ellen Lust, Marwa Shalaby and Chagai Weiss, “Female Representation and Legitimacy: Evidence from a Harmonized Experiment in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia,” American Political Science Review 118, no.1 (January 2024). ABSTRACT: How does the gender composition of deliberative committees affect citizens’ evaluations of their decision-making processes? Do citizens perceive decisions made by gender-balanced, legislative bodies as more legitimate than those made by all-male bodies? Extant work on the link between women’s descriptive representation and perceptions of democratic legitimacy in advanced democracies finds the equal presence of women legitimizes decision-making. However, this relationship has not been tested in more patriarchal, less democratic settings. We employ survey experiments in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia to investigate how citizens respond to gender representation in committees. We find that women’s presence promotes citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of committee processes and outcomes and, moreover, that pro-women decisions are associated with higher levels of perceived legitimacy. Thus, this study demonstrates the robustness of findings from the West regarding gender representation and contributes to the burgeoning literature on women and politics.
Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke and Rima Majed, “From Victims to Dissidents: Legacies of Violence and Popular Mobilization in Iraq (2003–2018),” American Political Science Review 118, no.1 (January 2024). ABSTRACT: A growing literature links experiences of armed conflict with postwar political behavior. This paper examines how legacies of wartime violence shape dynamics of protest in twenty-first-century Iraq. We argue that experiences of shared violence against civilians generate strong social and organizational ties, as individuals turn to neighbors, friends, and communal organizations or social groups to help them cope. These strengthened social networks endure beyond the end of the conflict, forming important vehicles that can facilitate the organization of protest when new grievances or opportunities arise. Further, we posit that these effects will be strongest when the perpetrator of wartime violence is a clear out-group—e.g., a foreign army or non-coethnic militia—which facilitates network strengthening by creating a sense of collective victimization and in-group solidarity. We support these arguments using an original database of Iraqi protests from 2010 to 2012 and data on civilian casualties during Iraq’s 2004–2009 conflict. We further test our argument with geo-referenced Arab Barometer surveys. We leverage a case study of Fallujah, based on original interviews and other qualitative data, to unpack mechanisms of network strengthening, endurance, and reactivation during the Iraqi protest wave of 2011.
Mai Hassan, “Coordinated Dis-Coordination,” American Political Science Review 118, no.1 (January 2024). ABSTRACT: Dissidents mobilizing against a repressive regime benefit from using public information for tactical coordination since widespread knowledge about an upcoming event can increase participation. But public calls to protest make dissidents’ anticipated activities legible to the regime, allowing security forces to better stifle mobilization. I examine collective action during Sudan’s 2018–19 uprising and find that mobilization appeared to be publicly coordinated through social movement organizations and internet and communicative technology, consistent with common channels identified by existing literature. Yet embedded field research reveals that some dissidents independently used public calls to secretly organize simultaneous contentious events away from publicized protest sites, perceiving that their deviations would make the regime’s repressive response relatively less efficient than the resulting efficiency losses on the movement’s mobilization. These findings push future work to interrogate more deeply the mechanisms by which dissidents use coordination channels that are also legible to the regime they are mobilizing against.
Lawrence Rubin, “A Middle East space race? Motivations, trajectories, and regional politics,” Space Policy (January 2024). ABSTRACT: In recent years, the Middle East has witnessed a tremendous growth in commercial, civil, and military space activities. For a region known for ethno-religious conflict and vast energy resources, what has motivated the birth and growth of these programs? To what extent do regional politics shape the development and trajectory of space programs? Is there a Middle East space race? This paper surveys the development of the Israeli, Egyptian, and the Emirati space programs to illustrate the extent to which the trajectories of their space programs are related to regional politics. These cases illustrate how a variety of regional political considerations related to security, prestige and economic development have and may continue to shape their space programs. For example, Israel developed its space program for national security reasons and focused its efforts on intelligence and reconnaissance. It has become a world leader in small-satellites because geopolitical realties have forced them to focus on less efficient launches with smaller payloads. Egypt established its program for economic development and to acquire status by claiming leadership in its peer-group of African nations. The U.A.E.’s ambitions in space are motivated by a vital need for economic diversification, driven by large-scale development plans, and by a desire to acquire prestige. This prestige is associated with space leadership at the regional as well as the international level, which Emiratis hope will inspire a STEM oriented, knowledge-based economy.
Resat Bayer and Ozge Kehmanlioglu, “Democratic backsliding, conflict, and partisan mobilisation of ethnic groups: local government control and electoral participation in Turkey,” South European Society and Politics (January 2024). ABSTRACT: Partisan mobilisation is critical for constituencies with low premobilisation participation, even in countries like Turkey with generally high levels of electoral turnout. We argue that parties appealing to ethnic minority constituencies benefit disproportionately from the symbolic and material resources that local government control provides. Central government’s exceptional decisions to intervene can, however, curtail access to these resources and affect electoral politics. Focusing on three Turkish elections and a referendum in 2015–2018, the article analyses how the political context of democratic backsliding and conflict affected the pro-Kurdish party’s control of municipalities, their mobilisation capacity, and hence turnout. Specifically, the previously higher rate of turnout in pro-Kurdish party-controlled municipalities compared to other municipalities disappeared following the elected mayors’ replacement by appointed trustees.