Catching Up with the MENA Academy
Great scholarship being produced despite...everything.
USAID: Where We Work (Archived)
In the midst of… everything… I’ve been falling behind on one of the core purposes of this blog, which is to highlight interesting new academic publications on the Middle East. I will be writing more soon about Trump’s insane plans for Gaza (I’m mortified to learn that a GW econ professor had some role in developing such blatantly illegal, immoral, impractical and poorly conceived plans). And there’s a lot to say about how the illegal shuttering of USAID — and the less noticed but also devastating funding cuts to the National Endowment for Democracy — is going to impact the Middle Eastern communities served by its critically important work, including through second order effects on the local partners which make up so much of already deeply embattled civil society across the region, and on the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI). It’s bad.
But it’s important to not lose sight of the actual work being done by so many great scholars. So today I just want to catch up with articles that have come across my desk in the last couple of weeks, and also some of the stuff that I’ve been doing.
First, I just want to flag that you can still download my Cambridge Element What is the Middle East? The Theory and Practice of Regions for free download for a little bit longer (after that, just email me and ask for a PDF, happy to send one). It’s designed to provoke and challenge as many of my colleagues in Middle East Studies as possible — hopefully at least one thing in there to annoy everyone alongside a lot to make them think differently about the history of our field, our current methodological and institutional practices, the different ways of thinking about “region”, and the potential for crossregional and transregional research. I hope that a lot of you find it useful for your syllabi, slotting it in to that Week 1 or 2 class on competing definitions of the Middle East. So check it out!
This week I also released POMEPS Studies 54 Debating US Primacy in the Middle East. I was really happy with this workshop and collection, which brought a diverse set of perspectives on the nature of American policy in the Middle East, its historical trajectory, and how to think about questions of American “withdrawal” from the region. The workshop was framed around Gaza, and how to think about the impact of American support for Israel’s devastating military campaign as regional and international public opinion and international legal institutions recoiled in horror. But it raises deeper and enduring questions about the nature of primacy, hegemony, and domination. Read it here!
Podcast Catchup!
On last week’s Middle East Political Science Podcast, I spoke with Bozena Wellborne of Smith College about her recent book, Women, Money and Political Participation in the Middle East. It’s a really interesting look at a neglected dimension of the participation of women in elections across the region — money. There’s been a lot of great work recently on women and politics in the Middle East — a sampler of which can be found in two symposia published recently in the APSA MENA Politics Newsletter: one on women and democratic backsliding and one on women and politics more broadly. We’ve seen fascinating work on the effects of gender quotas, political party lists, gendered implications of candidate performance, Parliamentary behavior, and so much more. Wellborne’s book (which we discussed at a POMEPS book workshop many years ago) examines which women can afford to run for office and how that matters for broader questions of representation and inclusion. Listen to our conversation here:
This week on the podcast, I spoke with Austin Knuppe of Utah State University about his recent Columbia University Press book, Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq. Knuppe intervenes in critically important debates about how ordinary citizens deal with state failure and civil war. While a lot of the literature focuses on those who leave - forced displacement and the challenges facing refugees — Knuppe asks about those who remain. How do they decide whether to keep their heads down, actively collaborate, or resist? What forms do collaboration and resistance take? Which threats do they see as most dangerous? And how do those behaviors affect the subsequent perceptions of those who stayed behind? The book draws on an impressive range of multimethod research, including some pioneering surveys. Listen here:
Around the Journals
Finally, I’m happy to spotlight a really rich and diverse set of recently published articles. I’m not going to summarize them all — just scan through and see for yourself. There’s some amazing work here, so check it out.
Hannes Baumann, “Monetary statecraft in the service of counter-revolution: Gulf monarchies’ deposits to Arab states’ central banks 1998–2022,” Review of International Political Economy (February 2025). ABSTRACT: Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) monarchies have deposited several tens of billions of dollars in other Arab states’ central banks since 2011 to prop up recipients’ currencies. GCC currencies do not themselves have the ‘currency power’ for the exercise of such monetary statecraft. Gulf monarchies deploy ‘petro-dollars’. Previous analyses had found that petro-dollar ‘recycling’ in the 1970s and 1980s had been directed by ‘the hidden hand of hegemony’ to serve US empire. The character of recent exercises of Gulf monetary statecraft differs. I compile a dataset of GCC states’ deposits in other Arab states’ central banks and analyse their politics using Armijo and Katada’s taxonomy of financial statecraft as an analytical framework. Gulf deposits to Arab states’ central banks were instances of offensive and bilateral financial statecraft aimed at influencing politics in recipient states. The effect of monetary statecraft was not systemic: Deposits reproduced the global role of the dollar as a reserve currency and donors largely worked in tandem with the International Monetary Fund. Yet the Gulf states were deploying their petro-dollars for their own regional political agenda rather than goals defined by Washington: This was monetary statecraft in the service of counter-revolution to the Arab uprisings.
Yasmeen Mekawy, “Remembering the Midan: Nostalgia and propaganda in Egyptian media and popular culture,” Mediterranean Politics (February 2025). ABSTRACT: State media attempts to rewrite history have multiple political effects – they may to varying degrees distort collective memory, but they may also trigger nostalgic recollections of revolution and revive contentious discourses and debates. This article analyzes the various affective registers through which the 2011 revolution is portrayed in Egyptian media – including utopic, hopeful, mournful, disenchanted, and dystopic – as well as nostalgic discourses and performances occasioned by revolutionary media. I argue that nostalgic memory practices are vehicles for both hope and despair as well as pleasure and pain, and therefore ambivalent in both political affect and effect, potentially mobilizing and demobilizing. Simultaneously, celebratory communal performances of revolutionary nostalgia in seemingly depoliticized leisure contexts render their meaning ambiguous enough to be tolerated. Despite reflecting ideological, class, and generational cleavages, nostalgic and romanticized discourses, and practices counter the state’s erasure and resignification of the revolution as a criminal conspiracy in public space and in media; they are thus politically useful for constructing and preserving unauthorized versions of collective memory, and therefore for potential future collective action.
Andrea Carboni, “The Houthi Movement and the Management of Instability in Wartime Yemen,” Civil Wars (February 2025). ABSTRACT: The article examines the wartime consolidation of the Houthi regime in Yemen. It interrogates how the Houthi regime has survived in the face of years-long conflict and domestic unrest. The article argues that overlapping processes of elite co-option, repression and legitimation helped the Houthi movement manage relations with domestic constituencies. Through the application of a socio-institutional framework, the article shows that a mix of institutional engineering and violence contributed to consolidation of the Houthi regime, allowing the movement to control the wartime instability derived from the volatile nature of national and local alliances.
Rahaf Aldoughli, “Authoritarianism and the Emergence of Parallel State Dynamics: Evidence From the Syrian Earthquake,” Digest of Middle Eastern Studies (February 2025). ABSTRACT: This article investigates the Syrian regime's strategic manipulation of the February 2023 earthquake to reaffirm its authority and maintain legitimacy. The regime's response to the disaster is analyzed to understand how authoritarian states leverage natural disasters for political gains. It argues that the Assad regime's survival is not merely about governance capabilities but about extending its infrastructural power and political decisions through co-opted civil society organizations. The earthquake highlighted the regime's fragile crisis management capabilities and its reliance on entities like the Syrian Trust for Development (STD) and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), which function as quasi-state apparatuses. These organizations, under the guise of civil society, operate as extensions of state power, embodying a “parallel state” structure. Using theoretical frameworks from scholars like Beshara and Gramsci, the article explores the regime's tactics of control, hegemony, and parallelization. It critically examines the blurred lines between state and civil society, emphasizing the regime's manipulation of international aid and the consolidation of its authority in the aftermath of the earthquake. This study contributes to the broader conversation on authoritarian durability, highlighting the complex interactions between state apparatuses and civil society in times of crisis.
Sonali Pahwa, “Social Media and the Politics of Ironic Belonging in Dubai,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (February 2025). ABSTRACT: Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.
Laleh Khalili, “Crude Knowledge: Petro-Periodicals and Resource Sovereignty,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (February 2025). ABSTRACT: The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter publications –both their context and content– traces the massive political transformations that saw a shift of power in the region, alongside a radical transformation in the representation of oil from a public good into a private property.
Smadar Ben-Natan, Dana Boulos, and Shirley Le Penne, “The “One Carceral State”: Mass Incarceration and Carceral Citizenship in Palestine/Israel,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (February 2025). ABSTRACT: Using the concept of the carceral state, this article articulates how Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has shifted to a nondemocratic one-state paradigm. While, initially, Israel operated a separate military carceral system for these areas, between 2000 and 2006 it dismantled the military system, transferred most Palestinian prisoners into Israel, and rebranded its civilian prison service as the National Prison Authority, making it the sole agency responsible for the incarceration of Palestinians. This reorganization consolidated a single carceral system inside Israeli territory—the one carceral state— which serves as crucial evidence of the de facto one-state paradigm and forms a centerpiece of this new regime in Israel/Palestine. By analyzing a broad range of archival and administrative documents and 168 Supreme Court decisions on the management of prisons and Palestinian prisoners, this study reveals how the massive “exclusionary inclusion” of the Palestinian prisoner population in Israeli state law and its administrative mechanisms changes the entire landscape of the Israeli settler-colonial citizenship regime. Palestinian prisoners become “carceral citizens” of the “one state” and are subject to a parallel, alternate legality, in which they expand their repertoire of resistance against the wider racialized and repressive regime across Palestine/Israel.
Öner Yigit, “Shifts in Religious Instrumentalization: Friday Sermons and Ethnic Conflict in Turkey,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (February 2025). ABSTRACT: Existing research shows that states and non-state actors often instrumentalize religion to serve political interests. However, how and when religious narratives shift in response to changing political needs is less understood. This study addresses this gap by examining Turkey’s strategic use of religion in its conflict with Kurdish insurgents. I argue that nationalized and institutionalized Islam in Turkey facilitates the instrumentalization of religion, allowing the state to switch between religious narratives based on political context. To show how these religious narratives shift, I compare Friday sermons during peace talks (2012–2015) and those delivered during cross-border military operations against the PKK/YPG. Using a text-as-data approach and topic modeling, I find that during peace talks, the state emphasizes Islamic brotherhood, encouraging Muslim Turks and Kurds to prioritize their Muslim identity over ethnic identity and seeking broader support for the government’s peace initiatives. In contrast, during military escalations following the peace process, the religious narrative shifts sharply toward nationalism, mobilizing support against the PKK/YPG and framing military actions as a defense of national and Islamic values. These findings contribute to the literature by showing how nationalized religion allows states to adapt contrasting narratives in co-religious ethnic conflicts to suit shifting political needs.
Anne Wolf, “How Erroneous Beliefs Trigger Authoritarian Collapse: The Case of Tunisia, January 14, 2011,” Comparative Political Studies (February 2025). ABSTRACT: Why was the longtime Tunisian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali ousted on January 14, 2011? Prevailing theories focus on popular mobilization, grievances, and the role of the army to explain the collapse of the authoritarian regime. I evaluate these arguments in light of new empirical evidence, which shows that they are insufficient to explain Ben Ali’s ousting. Analyzing key decisional moments and counterfactual scenarios, I propose that the regime collapsed because of a set of erroneous beliefs, which flourished amid the contingent revolutionary context. Erroneous beliefs are endogenous to highly contingent revolutionary periods and a potential contingency themselves in that they can change collective outcomes. This study shows how the microanalysis of events can furnish new insights into highly impactful events in history—the collapse of the Ben Ali regime gave rise to the wider Arab Uprisings—and topics of key concern to scholars of contentious politics, authoritarianism, and democratization.