Gaza Protests and the MENA Academy

Plus critical security studies, the Arab state, and more in this week's roundup!

Are you consumed with anxiety over the way too close presidential election which is less than a week away? I feel your pain. I’m not going to add to the Discourse on the election here. Instead, perhaps you can distract yourself by checking in with the MENA Academy and read some of the exciting new publications which have come out the last week. And there are quite a lot! This week’s MENA Academy roundup features two APSA Section newsletters focused on the Middle East, a special issue on critical security studies and political economy, and several articles revolving around issues of civil war orders and dynamics.

But first, I want to highlight an important contribution on Gaza protests in the United States over the last year: Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman and Jay Ulfelder, “Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023–2024,” Social Movement Studies (October 2024). Many of you may have seen their findings discussed in various platforms, including an early one I edited for Good Authority. This article in Social Movement Studies presents the fullest (to date) account of the Gaza protest movement, with data from 7 October 2023 to 7 June 2024. As they report (in the abstract): “the Crowd Counting Consortium recorded nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests and over 2,000 pro-Israel protests in the United States. Since January 2017, when CCC first started counting protest events and their crowd sizes, the current pro-Palestine protest wave involves the largest, most sustained US protests sparked by a foreign event.” What’s more, their data shows that “by looking at property damage and police injuries, we also conclude that this pro-Palestine movement has not been violent. That is true of both the national protest wave in general and of the student encampments in spring 2024 in particular.” Finally, they look at the demands articulated in those protests, finding that “the rhetorical core of this pro-Palestine movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them. To substantiate this point, we considered two sources of evidence: 1) the banners, signs, and chants seen or heard at pro-Palestine events; 2) the demands issued by organizers of over 100 student encampments.”

That important article might be read alongside a symposium in the Fall 2024 issue of the APSA MENA Politics Section’s newsletter MENA Politics. That publication is the last in the three year term of the excellent editorial team of Nermin Allam, Gamze Cavdar and Sean Yom. It features a provocative essay by the Egyptian scholar Rabab El-Mahdi about the abuses of “regional scholars” in the MENA political science literature, and a monumental thirteen essay symposium on gender and democratic backsliding in the Middle East, showcasing some of the best young scholars of the region alongside more senior colleagues.

What I wanted to highlight here, though, is a second symposium on student protest encampments which, more than most such publications, takes a genuinely cross-national and global perspective with articles on Germany and Lebanon alongside articles on the American climate. The symposium is framed by a provocative essay by the political theorist Jodi Dean which pushes back hard on the attempt to frame the campus protests as antisemitic, violent, or radical: “Netanyahu’s remarks are simply false. The campus protests universally called for a ceasefire. Many combined these calls with their long-standing advocacy of divestment from and boycotting of companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Nearly all the encampments were diverse, inclusive, and ecumenical. Students invited one another to participate in their religious and cultural traditions. They learned from and protected each other, creat- ing the safe spaces that the neoliberal university promised but consistently failed to provide. The protests and encampments didn’t express a desire to kill. They aimed to protect life, including Palestinian life.” Dean argues that nonetheless “the strategy has been effective. University administrations have jettisoned fundamental features of higher education: critical inquiry, free expression, and political engagement.”

Also in the roundtable, Emmaia Gelman praises the student encampments: “In a year of genocidal horrors in Palestine and confusion in the United States about how to resist, the student encampments of Spring 2024 – beautiful, messy, flawed, and experimental – have become a testament to the possibility of confronting intransigent power by refusing its terms: refusing to leave, refusing to be diverted from core demands to divest from war, and refusing weaponized debates over safety and antisemitism. While it is still too early to fully assess the impact of these encampments, they have already changed the political terrain in noticeable ways.” Jack Davies and Muriam Haleh Davis present a detailed account of how labor organizers at UC Davis built solidarity over Palestine, putting it into critical historical and theoretical perspective: “the relationship between apparently spontaneous popular uprising and the slower rhythms and rigors of labor organizing and action.” Jannis Julien Grimm and Lilian Mauthofer recount the truly extraordinary lengths to which Germany has gone to silence any form of critique or even discussion of Israel and Gaza, and the unintended effects: “The repression of protest on campus paired with the unprecedented intervention by state politicians into higher education autonomy became a critical juncture for the protest cycle, opening up the topic of academic freedom as a new additional field of contestation.” Deen Sharp compares student protest encampments with protest forms in Lebanon’s October 2019 uprising. Finally, Shahrazad Odeh looks at the repression of pro-Palestinian voices and the conscription of academia into nationalist mobilization in Israeli universities.

For more on Gaza and the MENA Academy, see my earlier posts on educide in Gaza and the challenges facing campuses this academic year, the challenge to academic freedom in historical perspective, Gaza and Middle East Studies, and the battle to frame the campus protests:

And now for the rest of the MENA Academy weekly roundup.

First up, the Fall 2024 issue of Democracy and Autocracy, the newsletter of the APSA Section of the same name, features a symposium based on the new book Making Sense of the Arab State, which I produced and edited with Steven Heydemann. Our opening framing essay gives a summary of the project’s goals and approach:

Arab states exhibit unusual variation in state capacity, modes of governance, institutional formations, and processes of adaptation and change. From the perspective of internal security, Arab states seem unfathomably strong, built for absolute domination over civil society and pervasive surveillance and control of the public sphere. But from the perspective of effective governance and development, they seem shockingly weak, unable to provide the essential functions which might attract foreign investment or unlock robust and equitable economic growth. Even more puzzling, Arab states perform the appearance of many common attributes of stateness but demonstrate distinctive patterns of effectiveness in actually delivering on state functions, from services and public order to the symbolic, performative, and spatial attributes through which states traditionally manifest themselves in and through societies. Arab regimes certainly embrace globalized attributes of stateness as affirmationsof their sovereignty and legitimacy, yet Arab states often defy expectations of stateness that are widely held not only among social scientists but, as chapters in our volume show, among Arab societies as well. What is more, they do so in ways that differ from the patterns observed in other postcolonial regions of the Global South, manifesting characteristics—strengths and weaknesses, presences and absences, effects and affects—that arguably set them apart.

The symposium includes essays by several other contributors to the volume: Lisa Anderson, Toby Dodge, and Bassel Salloukh. It’s a great way to get a taste of the volume (which is available open access, I might add, for those of you designing spring courses). I was especially excited to see that the Newsletter also included a review dialogue between the authors of two outstanding books which I edited and published in my Columbia University Press series: Hesham Sallam’s Classless Politics (on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) and Sofia Fenner’s Shouting in a Cage (on nationalist oppositions in Egypt and Morocco). Overall, this issue is a must read for anyone interested in the Middle Eastern state and political orders — download it here.

Next up: three things to read on wartime orders, critical security studies, and civil wars — as well as a genuinely provocative essay questioning the value of doing field research with armed insurgent groups which probably deserves a blog post of its own!

The October 2024 issue of Middle East Law and Governance features an outstanding roundtable on critical security studies and political economy organized and introduced by Sean Yom and Peter Moore. Contributors include Omar Dahi, “Syrian War Economies”; Abeer Al-Aryani, “The Political Economy of Energy Security in Wartime Yemen”; and Peter Moore and Sean Yom, “The Fortress State: Extreme Militarization in Jordan”.

Abdullah al-Jabassini, “Tribalocracy: Tribal Wartime Social Order and Its Transformation in Southern Syria,” International Studies Quarterly (October 2024). ABSTRACT: This article introduces a new phenomenon in the study of civil war: tribal wartime social order. The proposed theory of tribalocracy, or tribal rule, integrates insights from civil war studies, anthropology, and sociology to provide a nuanced account of social order and its transformation in tribal warzones. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Hauran region in southern Syria, the proposed theory explains how endogenous rebel groups, seeking to maximize a wide range of benefits rendered by tribal shaykhs, refrain from establishing a new form of order. Instead, they co-opt, reassert, and operate under a pre-existing order in reserve. In so doing, rebels rule minimally, leaving most of the local affairs in the hands of civilian actors closely monitored by tribal shaykhs. Given the fluid and volatile nature of wartime order, the proposed theory offers a compelling explanatory framework to account for the transition in the forms of wartime social order from a civilian model to one dominated by rebels. The theory and empirical results expand our understanding of the localized and kinship-based forms of solidarity, the origins of rebel organizations, the source of wartime social order, civilian agency, and the roles played by tribal shaykhs under rebel rule.

Niamatullah Ibrahimi and Romain Malejacq, “Is it even worth it? The ethics of researching armed groups in ‘the field’,” Conflict, Security, and Development (October 2024). ABSTRACT: Conflict scholars are increasingly voicing concerns about the risks and challenges of conducting research in violent environments. Yet, this collective effort remains largely driven by the underlying belief that conducting fieldwork in conflict settings is both necessary for knowledge production and social change, and appropriate with regards to mainstream ethical guidelines and practices. In this article, we reflect on our experiences and positionalities conducting field research on armed groups in Afghanistan to question these assumptions. We challenge common understandings of ‘the field’ itself as a bounded, demarcated space in which the consequences of a researcher’s actions can be anticipated, mitigated or prevented. We expose the fallacy of ever controlling ‘the field’ and argue that the likelihood of achieving any unquestionable good through immersive research is therefore quite low. We advocate for a more humble approach to our research endeavours and, overall, more restraint. The bar for ethical field-intensive research might be much higher than we all assume. We must accept that, at times, the risks are not worth it.

And finally… a few more great articles out recently which don’t really fit a theme but are worth your time:

Tyler Parker and Ali Bakir, “Strategic Shifts in the Gulf: GCC Defence Diversification amidst US Decline,” The International Spectator (October 2024). ABSTRACT: The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members have reacted differently to strategic shifts in the Middle East, including the relative decline of the United States (US). Why have the GCC governments differed in their defence diversification steps of alignment formation, policy independence and arms procurement? By focusing on the perceptions of Gulf decision-makers, we argue that the GCC governments that are less confident in US security provision have been more proactive in pursuing diversification, whereas those that are more confident in the US have been less pursuant of diversification. We evaluate our argument by comparing the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Kuwait.

Anne Kirstine Rønn, “From Kandahar to bride: Protesters’ critique of the media's portrayal of Tripoli during Lebanon's 2019 October Uprising,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (October 2024). ABSTRACT: During the Lebanese 2019 uprising, the country's second-largest city, Tripoli, became portrayed as the “bride of the revolution.” This portrayal was seen to break with the city's former stigma as a hotbed of extremism. However, as this article shows, local protesters were not unambiguously happy with this portrayal. Based on interviews with 30 protesters and fieldwork observations, the article seeks to understand the critical views of this narrative. It shows that there was a widespread perception among Tripoli protesters that the narrative of their city as the “bride of the revolution,” as presented by the media, represented a distorted image that romanticized, depoliticized, and de-contextualized the uprising. This narrative was believed to serve a political purpose. These findings provide two main contributions to scholarly debates concerning identity narratives and the role of media for social movements in societies like Lebanon, characterized by hybrid regimes and a complex media-politics nexus. First, it points to the complexity of breaking stigma and changing geography-based identities. Second, it shows how the political ownership of media fuels the understanding of media frames as being politically motivated, even when they seem sympathetic to protests.

Sultan Alamer, “From Paris to Ṭā’if: Sovereignty, Borders, and the Question of Minorities in the Arabian Peninsula,” Nationalities Papers (October 2024). ABSTRACT: Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire ruled the southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula. However, unlike other Ottoman territories in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the fate of this region was not decided during the Paris Peace Conference. This created a vacuum of power that allowed the local elites of Arabia to engage in a lengthy process of conflict, negotiations, peace talks, and the exchange of ideas to resolve issues of legitimacy, sovereignty, borders, and cultural differences. This article argues that these local elites of Arabia developed an alternative model of statehood and sovereignty that persisted until the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990. The immediate result of this new model was the separation of al-Mikhlāf al-Sulaimānī region and the transformation of the people of the Najrān region into a sectarian group.

That’s it for this week — see you on the other side.