Free Stuff!
Get ready for the summer with a bunch of free Middle East/Africa content I found for you.
I’m just back from a week in Dakar and Paris, for a scintillating Program on African Social Research workshop on religion and politics with a dozen brilliant junior scholars from across the continent; those papers will be published this fall. Before departing, I spent some time on Amazon looking for Kindle books to read on my long flights. To my surprise, I found some really interesting books that had normal academic pricing for their paperback and hardcovers, but the Kindle versions were completely free. Free, I tell you, free!
I heartily approve of this kind of tiered publication model for academic presses (charging for the physical version while making Kindle versions either free or very heavily discounted). It democratizes knowledge and makes academic books accessible to readers across the globe who otherwise couldn’t afford to read them. Let’s hope this model becomes the norm, and the days of “$120 hardcover, $118 Kindle version” fade into oblivion. And let’s cheer for Cornell University Press, the University of California Press, UNC Press, and Bristol University Press for supporting this model.
Instead of keeping it to myself, I figured I might as well share just in case you too were looking for summer beach or travel reading. Fair warning - I haven’t read most of these books yet. Some of them, not all of them. But they all look interesting, and they are all — have I mentioned yet? — free!
First up, one of my favorite books of the year:
Sarah Parkinson, Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2023). My pick for the MENA political science best book of the year offers a bold rethinking of the role of women and organizations in supporting long-term insurgent movements. It really made me rethink the nature of insurgent organizations and the sources of their endurance or collapse. If you want to know more, I reviewed it on the blog here:
And now for the rest.
Burleigh Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell University Press, 2022). I absolutely loved this book, and plan to do a full post and podcast about it when we return this fall. It beautifully shows the intense interactions and interconnections between student activism between France and French Africa during the global revolutionary moment of 1968. I learned a lot about the evolution and development of higher education in the French colonies and about the enduring transnational connections after formal independence. Highly recommended!
Jean Beaman, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017). This study of the limits of social mobility and enduring prejudice against upwardly mobile children of North African immigrants in France seems pretty timely these days.
Zachary Valentine Wright, Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). I’ve been really interested in transregional connections between the Middle East and Africa these last few years, and this monograph on the history of the Tijaniyya Sufi order promises to fill in fascinating details in the evolution of Islamic practice across West and North Africa.
Inka Stock, Time, Migration and Forced Immobility: Sub-Saharan African Migrants in Morocco (Bristol University Press, 2019). “Africa in Movement” was the topic of the very first issue of Pasiri’s journal African Social Research (which I edited), focusing on intra-African migration, with a strong transregional focus. Stock’s book directly engages those themes, focusing on the African migrants who get stuck in Morocco.
Perla Issa, The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp (University of California Press, 2021). This book is an alumnus of a POMEPS Junior Scholars Book Workshop held at Princeton back in 2017. It’s a fascinating ethnographic study of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon, focusing on the interconnections between personal and political networks. Delighted to see this one published!
Torunn Wimpelmann, The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan (University of California Press, 2017). Based on six years of research in Afghanistan, this book explores the dilemmas and opportunities for Afghan women confronting gender based violence and discrimination. Its argument about the unanticipated effects of relying on international actors seems to have broad resonance with cases across the Middle East and Africa, and I’m looking forward to finding out more.
If books are just too much of an investment for you during a hot, lazy summer, then can I suggest a few journals which are offering (temporary) open access?
The Journal of Democracy’s summer issue is open access for a month. It includes some great articles you’ll want to read, including this dissection of Erdogan’s electoral victory in Turkey by Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, Noam Gidron’s discussion of Israel’s democratic crisis, Sean Yom’s counterintuitive take on Kuwait’s struggling democratic institutions, and an absolutely fascinating comparative analysis of the origins of military supremacy in autocracies by Dan Slater, Lucan Way, Jean Lachappelle, and Adam Casey.
I hope you find something of interest here. I’ll try to keep sharing my free finds if people (and publishers) appreciate it!