Five Journal Articles I Liked (This Week)
Post-Islamism, university elections, teaching gender politics, Iraqi development and more!
It’s been a while since I’ve done a roundup of the interesting journal articles that have been patiently collecting in my downloads folder. I plan to get back to making this a weekly thing. And so here you go: Five Things I Liked (This Week), Academic Journal Edition!
(1) Joas Wagemakers, “Citizenship in the Writings of a Post-Islamist Ex-Muslim Brother: The Case of Ruhayyil Gharayiba”, Religions (2023). A fascinating, detailed look at the ideas and practice of the relatively little-known but interesting Jordanian Islamist intellectual Ruhayyil Gharayiba (as his name is transilatered here - I’ve referred to him in my own writings as Ruhayl Ghurayba). Part of a special issue on post-Islamism in the great open-access journal Religions, Wagemakers’ article digs deep into Gharayiba’s efforts to reconcile questions of democracy, tolerance and inclusion within a reformist Islamist perspective. Those ideas are embedded within the so-called Zamzam initiative, a (covertly) regime supported move to split and divide the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood.
(2) Jeroen Gunning and Dima Smaira, “Who you gonna call? Theorising everyday security practices in urban spaces with multiple security actors – The case of Beirut's Southern Suburbs.” Political Geography (2023). This ethnographic look at the everday security practices looks closely at how citizens in the Dahiya (the southern suburbs of Beirut) navigate the daily demands of personal and family insecurity. Gunning (full disclosure: my co-author on several projects related to Islamist warscapes) and Smaira carried out years of fieldwork with ordinary people in the Dahiya, exploring where they turned when faced with personal challenges. Emerging with a theoretical framework rooted in Bourdieu’s notions of field and habitus, they point to the role of personal networks and varying sources of authority to make sense of the sources of order. For more, you can listen to my conversation with Gunning on last week’s Middle East Political Science podcast!
(3) Nermin Allam, Marwa Shalaby and Hind Ahmed Zaki, “Perilous Pedagogy: Teaching Gender and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa,” Politics and Gender (2023). Three of my favorite emerging scholars of gender and politics in the Middle East pulled together this sensational special issue of Politics and Gender on the challenges posed by teaching those issues in the MENA context (several of the editors and contributors were involved in a special issue on gender and politics that I edited for the APSA MENA Politics Newsletter). The symposium addresses a wide range of issues, from student biases to curricular inequities to positionality in the classroom. The issue does a great job of examining these issues in the context of both Western and MENA institutions. Contributors include Gamze Cavdar, Shereen Abouelnaga, Katja Žvan Elliott, and Huda Alsahi.
(4) Christiana Parreira, Daniel Tavana and Charles Harb, “Ethnic political socialization and university elections,” Party Politics (2023). A fascinating study of socialization of university students through campus politics, using a clever pre- and post-election conjoint survey design with students at the American University of Beirut. Parreira, Tavana and Harb argue that the role of ethnic partisan students as especially active mobilizers in university election campaigns increases in-group identification in ways that carry over into national political identities and electoral behavior.
(5) Marsin Alshamary and Hamzeh Haddad, “The Collective Neglect of Southern Iraq: Missed Opportunities for Development and Good Governance,” International Peacekeeping (2023). Why has the south of Iraq remained mired in poverty and underdevelopment despite two decades of post-invasion domination of the national government by Shi’a political parties? Alshamary and Haddad explore this puzzle by focusing on the legacies of decades of Saddam Hussein’s neglect of the region combined with post-occupation suspicion in the international community of Iran’s role in the Shi’a dominated areas. That’s not enough, though, and the authors zero in on the incentive structures for national-level Shi’a politicians, where the election system and pervasive corruption lead members of Parliament to deprioritize local concerns. A great example of the growing body of political research coming out of Iraq after long neglect in the literature. You can listen to my conversation with Alshamary and Haddad here!
Check out the MENA Academy every week for Five Things I Liked (This Week)!