Catching Up With the MENA Academy

Rounding up new articles and publications after the POMEPS annual conference

The Project on Middle East Political Science held its annual meeting on Friday in an online format, with just over a hundred scholars at all career levels from the United States, Europe (and the UK, if you think that’s a separate thing), and the MENA region. We structured the conference as an open discussion of Israel’s war on Gaza and its effects on both the region and campuses. It was a cathartic, welcome day of discussions which allowed a wide range of views to be heard without a trace of the polarization which dominates too much of the public sphere. The conference discussed some really interesting questions about the degree to which Gaza will lead to fundamental change in regional politics and the stakes and purposes of comparison vs exceptionalism in thinking about Gaza. Keep an eye out for a report on those discussions next week.

Cross-national comparisons of those crackdowns were especially instructive, with network members reporting on the climate in the UK, France, other parts of the EU, and several MENA countries in addition to American campuses. Germany’s ongoing full-bore assault on Middle East experts and signatories of a statement in defense of protestors at the Free University of Berlin deserves much more attention than it’s received - not least as an indicator of where American political attacks on free speech and academic freedom could be heading.

For now, though, let’s catch up on a couple of weeks’ worth of MENA publications. We kick off with an important collection put out by the Arab Reform Initiative on knowledge production and public policy in the Arab world. Then, we’ve got three fascinating pieces on Syria’s war, with two of them focused on Bashar al-Asad’s counterinsurgency strategies. Other articles include a look at China’s digital investment strategies in North Africa, a comparison of colonial land policy in french Algeria and British India, and a new typology of corruption in the Arab world. Hopefully you’ll all find something of interest here; I’ll be back next week with more.

Jamil Mouawad, Sarah Anne Rennick, and Andrew Findell-Aghnatios (eds.), “Knowledge as a Public Good: Reconceiving the Purpose and Methods of Knowledge Production,” Arab Reform Initiative (May 2024). This edited collection by the Arab Reform Initiative, supported by the Carnegie Corporation, seeks to take stock of knowledge production on Arab political movements, identify strengths and shortcomings, and point towards novel ways forward. As the editors describe their mission, “Arab engaged scholars and activists shared a decade’s worth of experiences and the lessons learned about how knowledge dissemination can help civil society organisations, community leaders, and average citizens to become informed and seasoned about the links between their grievances and demands and the public policies produced by their political systems. The conversation quickly shifted to how knowledge production can reinstate the ‘public good’ as a cornerstone of any social contract between governing groups and governed populations.” The collection features a wide range of fascinating contributions, with especially standout essays by Dina El-Khawagga’s mapping of the various sites and modalities of Arab knowledge production and Dina Wahba’s on the experience of diaspora Arab scholars on the margins of Western policy analysis and academia.

Sean Lee, “How Bashar al-Asad Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the “War on Terror,” International Studies Quarterly (June 2024). ABSTRACT: This article draws on regime newspaper archives and the Arabic-language speeches of and interviews with Syrian president Bashar al-Asad over the last two decades to track how Syrian governmental rhetoric on the question of “terrorism” has changed over time. Engaging with the literature on how ideas, technologies, and contentious repertoires diffuse and spread and how regimes learn from each other, I show how the Asad regime has moved from a discourse that saw “terrorism” as a Western and/or Israeli concept used to delegitimize primarily Palestinian and Lebanese resistance sponsored by Damascus to a discourse that embraces the rhetoric of the “war on terror” in order to legitimize the regime's counterinsurgency policies during the current conflict. I argue that this rhetorical shift is dependent on the ethno-sectarian identity of the population in question through a comparison of regime rhetoric on three separate uprisings in recent Syrian history: the current uprising (2011–present); the Kurdish uprising of 2004; and the Druze uprising in 2000. Since the current uprising is seen as a predominantly Sunni Arab affair, the Syrian regime has used “war on terror” rhetoric in ways that it did not during the Kurdish and Druze uprisings. I then situate this rhetorical move in time as a post-9/11 development by comparing current regime rhetoric with that of the Hafez al-Asad regime's rhetoric during the uprising centered in Hama in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Charlotte Al-Khalili, “Present/absent futures: waiting in the aftermath of a defeated revolution,” History and Anthropology (May 2024). ABSTRACT: This article explores time and temporality in the wake of the defeat of the Syrian 2011 revolution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrian revolutionaries in Gaziantep, Turkey; it argues that waiting for detainees to be freed, for return to the homeland or for the revolutionary cycle's repetition and closure, deeply modifies displaced Syrians' relation to present, past and future. Syrians' waiting thus appears reversed - directed to the past and awaiting a different repetition of the past - for, in this context, the temporality of displacement is simultaneously a temporality of the aftermath of defeat.

Samer Bakkour and Gareth Stansfield, “Sectarianism, indiscriminate violence and displacement in the Syrian Regime’s Civil War strategy,” Conflict, Security and Development (May 2024). ABSTRACT: In the Syrian Civil War, external observers have often misunderstood and misrepresented the nature and significance of indiscriminate violence that drives displacement, with the result that it has been (mis)understood as being driven by primordial sectarian hatred. This is of course far from the only contemporary civil war in which sectarianism has been ascribed without due care and consideration. While this article acknowledges sectarianism as part of the conflict; however, it treats it as less of a natural ‘outgrowth’ and more as part of a calculated and deliberate ‘coercive counterinsurgency’ strategy that the Regime has applied across the country. The article suggests that indiscriminate violence, which we might otherwise be predisposed to view as an ‘excess’, should be understood as part of a strategy, and more specifically a ‘coercive counterinsurgency’. Therefore, the article identifies four population displacement strategies (bombings, blockades, starvation and massacres) that the Regime has applied in four parts of the country and brings out their strategic features in clearer detail. Ultimately, the reader will come to understand how sectarianism, indiscriminate violence, and displacement function as part of an integrated ‘coercive counterinsurgency’ strategy that the Regime has developed and applied over the course of the Civil War.

Tin Hanane Al-Kadi, “Learning along the Digital Silk Road? Technology transfer, power, and Chinese ICT corporations in North Africa,” The Information Society (May 2024). ABSTRACT: While much attention has been paid to how China’s rise as a digital superpower could threaten US hegemony over cyberspace, much less has been written on what the Digital Silk Road, or the presence of Chinese tech firms in developing countries more broadly, means for technological upgrading and development. This article contributes to filling this gap by investigating the technology spillovers emanating from two Chinese tech giants – Huawei and ZTE – in Algeria and Egypt. Using a political economy framework that combines insights from structuralist economic development and techno-politics and drawing on over 70 semi-structured interviews and field-observations, it argues that despite localizing activities that bear the promise of generating significant linkages, the two Chinese tech firms created no meaningful learning opportunities for domestic entities that contribute to technological upgrading. What could at first seem like developmental connections that promote technology transfers are found to be linkages diffusing Chinese infrastructures, hardware, software, processes, and standards that shape distinct digital systems. Without pro-active policies from host governments, the Digital Silk Road risks creating new technological dependencies; locking local ICT actors into activities and relationships captured and defined by Chinese tech giants.

Adria Lawrence and Fahad Sajid, “The Political Origins of Colonial Land Policy: Evidence From British India and French Algeria,” Comparative Political Studies (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Whereas the literature on colonial legacies has flourished in recent years, relatively less attention has been paid to the origins of colonial institutions. What explains variation in the design of colonial institutions? Some scholars have stressed the importance of precolonial factors, arguing that institutions were designed to reflect the environmental and socio-political conditions that the colonizers encountered in the colonies. Others hold that policymaking reflected the colonial powers’ metropolitan identity and aims. We believe these literature have been insufficiently attentive to the colonial state and the political ideals of colonial bureaucrats. Drawing on evidence from British India and French Algeria, we show that land policy was shaped by intense competition between ideologically motivated officials, who disagreed over the uses and aims of state power. Theorizing the role of ideas allows us to explain variation in colonial policies across both space and time while highlighting the indispensability of qualitative methods of analysis.

Assem Dandashly and Christos Kourtelis, “Political corruption in the Arab Mediterranean countries: an innovative typology,” Democratization (May 2024). ABSTRACT: Corruption is a major challenge in the Arab Mediterranean countries (AMCs). The fight against it was a key point in the Arab uprisings, yet since then and despite the international community’s attempts to support anti-corruption strategies, the governments of the AMCs have not been able to address effectively the demands of their population. The article compares the anti-corruption initiatives in four AMCs: two republican semi-presidential systems (Egypt, Tunisia) and two constitutional monarchies (Jordan, Morocco). It focuses on their fight against political corruption, which has different forms. To reduce corruption, policymakers advocate the decentralization of power, as it leads to more accountability and transparency. The article unpacks the idea of decentralization and asks to what extent it contributes to reducing political corruption in the region. In doing so, the article produces a new typology that adds two important factors that contribute to a better understanding of the links between anti-corruption initiatives and decentralization: the challenges to the political survival of the government and the type of external support to fight corruption. The findings show that decentralization measures frequently result in administrative deconcentration rather than the decentralization of decision-making. Thus, they reproduce political corruption in the region.