Giving thanks to the MENA Academy

A special Thanksgiving weekend edition of the MENA Academy Roundup!

These are disorienting and dispiriting times, from Israel’s unending devastation of what remains of Gaza to the implications of America’s willingness to re-elect Donald Trump despite… waves hands… everything. It’s important not to give in to despair, though. Personally, I am deeply and profoundly thankful for my sweet little Hazelnut; last year at this time, she was still in the NICU with no timetable for coming home and now she’s home, happy, and healthy. And thanks to all of you for subscribing and supporting my work here, even when Hazelnut makes my posting schedule… erratic.

I’d also like to give some thanks for Middle East Studies on campus, believe it or not. Don’t get me wrong — the outlook for our field looks exceedingly grim. The codification of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism to include criticism of Israel, the passage of legislation to allow nonprofits working on issues related to Palestine and Israel to be stripped of their nonprofit status on the basis of secret evidence, the continuing complicity — or more — of too many campus administrators to repress any speech or inquiry related to Palestine, the weaponization of the Title VI process, the push for legislation to punish institutions which embrace boycotts or divestment against Israel, and more all point to the mortal danger to research, writing, advocacy, and free speech on Middle East issues.

But, as I told a presidential panel of the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting a couple of weeks ago, there are also good reasons to not give in to despair. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about the United States and Gaza to Ohio Wesleyan — a very good, small liberal arts campus in north-central Ohio outside of Columbus with no particular Middle Eastern focus. The experience was entirely typical of my other speaking engagements over the last year: a packed room (on a Wednesday night late in the semester), students and other audience members listening carefully, thoughtful and direct questions, and no confrontational fireworks whatsoever. It was exactly what you’d expect, and like, to see from an engaged campus. And it reinforces my general sense that the vast majority of students, and other nonspecialists, just want to learn more about these issues and are hungry for any opportunity to hear different perspectives and useful context.

The campus protests last spring may not have recurred this fall at the same level of intensity (partly because of exceptional levels of pre-emptive repression), but it’s clear that the experience has awakened high levels of attention and interest in issues related to Israel and the broader Middle East that are not simply fading away. Previous moments of upheaval in the Middle East — the 1990-91 Gulf war, the early 2000s 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, and the Arab uprisings of 2011 — each led to dramatic growth in Middle East Studies fueled by student demand, renewed interest in the region from the disciplinary mainstream, and institutional interest in policy relevance. There's an exceptional push right now to prevent that from happening again, to not only block new investments in understanding the Middle East but to decimate existing strengths. But, as grim as it looks right now, I believe that the university and college leaderships, as well as foundations and other funders, which lean into Middle East scholarship right now rather than running away from potential controversy will be vindicated and emerge much stronger for it.

And now for the MENA Academy weekly roundup! It’s another rich one, attesting yet again to the depth and richness of academic expertise on the region. This week we lead with the annual special issue of Current History on the Middle East, and then feature a wide range of articles on topics such as civil-military relations in Israel, Palestinian social media activism, the sourcing and evidence for scholarship on Saudi Arabia, anti-LGBTQI repression in Egypt, ambiguous citizenship regimes for Palestinians in Jordan, spatial variation in protest dynamics in Iran, military purges and state building in post-revolutionary Egypt, Gulf interventionism in Sudan, and revolutionary journalism in Syria. Enjoy!

Nathan Brown leads off Current History’s annual Middle East issue with a typically astute overview of October 7 and its aftermath: “An abandoned peace process, increasingly severe Israeli restrictions on Gaza, and divided Palestinian leadership set the stage for the October 2023 surprise attack by Hamas. The devastating Israeli response has left much of the territory in ruins and decimated Hamas’s top ranks, while setting off a wider regional war involving Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Iran. US-led attempts to negotiate a cease-fire and resurrect the goal of a two-state solution have proved futile to date, as both sides remain irreconcilable, even in terms of basic understandings of the situation. Peace appears more distant than ever, though global views of the conflict are shifting.”

Also featured in the issue is an outstanding piece by Dana El Kurd on the authoritarian, and anti-Palestinian, implications of the push towards Saudi normalization with Israel and the broader Abraham Accords process: “Diplomatic normalization between Israel and Arab states, most recently in the 2020 Abraham Accords, has been hailed as a mutually beneficial form of peacemaking. But these “peace deals” often result in repression of Arab public support for the Palestinian cause, while reinforcing authoritarianism in both Israel and the Arab world.”

The issue also includes a great piece by Brahim el-Guabli on Amizagh activism in Morocco and across the Sahel; Natalie Koch on the dangers of the “sustainability spectacle” lying beneath the Gulf’s highly visible environmental diplomacy; Austin Knuppe on how Iraqis survived under the Islamic State, based on a new book in my Columbia University Press series; and Dina Wahba on Egypt’s urban redesign in the name of counterrevolution and militarized authoritarianism.

Articles from Around the MENA Academy

Ian Lustick, “Democracy, Liberal Zionism, and Civil-Military Relations in Israel: A Review Article,” Political Science Quarterly (November 2024). ABSTRACT: Two books on civil-military relations in Israel, published eighteen years apart, focus on Israel's future as a Jewish democracy. Peri's 2006 volume depicts the security establishment as a threat to civilian rule, whereas Ziv, in his 2024 book, portrays waning political influence of the Israeli military and security services as associated with democratic backsliding. The authors each favor the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but differ on whether opportunities for it have been missed because the military and security establishment has had too much or too little influence over government policy. Consideration of the one-state reality suggests the extent to which both arguments have been overtaken by events.

Giulia Daniele and Sophia Maria Kelsch, “Beyond online and offline activism: #SaveSheikhJarrah and contemporary resistance in Palestine,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (November 2024). ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the interconnections between online and offline activism in Palestine, with a detailed analysis of the case of Sheikh Jarrah (east Jerusalem). We examine current strategies of Palestinian digital resistance that have highlighted the relevance of interlinking struggles both at the grassroots level and on the internet. Within the settler colonial framework, the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah stands as one of the most emblematic contemporary struggles against the Israeli military occupation, particularly against the ongoing evictions taking place in areas such as Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. In recent years, this hashtag has drawn unprecedented global attention to the Palestinian cause. This article is based on extensive digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews with young Palestinian activists conducted from 2021 to 2023. Through an exploration of activists’ narratives surrounding the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement, we critically examine the interplay of diverse forms of resistance in the age of social media. Our lens of analysis links grassroots and online struggles, offering a fresh perspective on digital activism in the current discourse on culture and communication within Palestinian studies.

Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd, “Inspecting the Engine Room: Source Selection and Methodological Considerations of “Saudi Studies”,” Journal of Arabian Studies (November 2024). ABSTRACT: This survey article analyses methodologies and source selection in the sub-field of Saudi studies to explore to what extent authors conduct fieldwork in Saudi Arabia or evaluate Arabic primary sources. To do so, I analysed 152 articles on Saudi Arabia that were published in 10 leading Middle Eastern Studies journals. The results show that there are significant differences in the selection of sources between various categories of key topics that emerged from the articles. Publications on various shades of Islamism and Jihadism in Saudi Arabia as well as smaller sub-fields of gender studies and literature built on extensive fieldwork and original Arabic language sources. Foreign policy and security studies as well as to some extent economic themes possess the potential to develop source selection and fieldwork in the future. The findings suggest a bias rooted in an epistemological viewpoint of discounting Saudi society as a source of relevant information about Saudi politics.

Shaimaa Magued, “Scapegoating Queerness: Associating Egyptian LGBTQIA Advocacy to Western Conspiracy as a Strategy for Aborting Democratization,” Critical Sociology (November 2024). ABSTRACT: Focusing on Egypt as a case study, this paper juxtaposes Mubarak and al-Sisi’s anti-queer measures in order to delineate their discursive strategy in framing collective victimhood vis-à-vis Western-sponsored gender activism in an attempt to overshadow the Muslim Brotherhood’s political visibility and reverse the liberal gains of the January 25 Revolution, respectively. This study argues that both presidents’ anti-queer discourse succeeded to abort calls for democratization because of rulers’ capitalization on populist and religious-nationalist idioms in developing a collective victimhood frame as a defensive strategy against constructed threats. Building on the social movement theories’ framing approach, this study unpacks the state’s three-pronged collective victimhood frame by drawing on the revival of Western colonial heritage, sovereignty assertion, and cultural authenticity to validate a generalized repression against non-heteronormative identities and non-conforming sexual practices during the Queen Boat incident in May 2001 and following al-Sisi’s ascension to power from 2014 until 2024.

Lillian Frost and Steven Schaaf, “Citizenship in the shadow of law: identifying the origins, effects, and operation of legal ambiguity in Jordan,” Law and Society Review (November 2024). ABSTRACT: What are the origins and effects of legal ambiguity in authoritarian regimes? Using a detailed case study of nationality rights in Jordan – which draws from interviews with 210 Jordanian political officials, judges, lawyers, activists, and citizens/residents – we develop a framework for understanding how legal ambiguity emerges, and how it matters, under authoritarianism. We first conceptualize four discrete forms in which legal ambiguity manifests: lexical ambiguity (in legal texts); substantive ambiguity (in status as law); conflictual ambiguity (between contradictory legal rules); and operational ambiguity (in enforcement processes). We then scrutinize the emergence and effects of legal ambiguity in Jordanian nationality policy by integrating historical process tracing, detailed interview evidence, and a content analysis of archival documents, laws, and court verdicts pertaining to nationality rights. Our findings contribute to scholarship on legal ambiguity, authoritarian legality, and discretionary state authority by showing that (1) crisis junctures make the emergence of legal ambiguity more likely; (2) legal ambiguity takes a variety of different forms that warrant conceptual disaggregation; and (3) different forms of legal ambiguity often have disparate effects on how authoritarian state power is organized and experienced in public life.

Peyman Asadzade, “Demographic features or spatial structures? Unpacking local variation during the 2022 Iranian protests,” Journal of Peace Research (November 2024). ABSTRACT: Why do protests emerge and endure in some localities but not others? This study focuses on urban protests in the city of Tehran, Iran’s capital and largest city, during the 2022 uprising to explain why protests emerged and endured in some neighbourhoods but not others. Using an original geocoded dataset of 339 protest events at the neighbourhood level, I test two competing sets of demographic and spatial explanations. The results reveal that protests are more likely to emerge and persist in neighbourhoods with a higher percentage of educated citizens, closer proximity to university campuses and convenient access to metro stations. I provide theoretical explanations on how education boosts political awareness, university campuses act as networking hubs influencing surrounding areas and metro stations facilitate critical gathering points for protests. The findings remain consistent even when I control for a range of variables and use alternative specifications.

Federico Donelli and Altea Pericoli, “Foreign Aid, Identities and Interests: Qatar and the UAE in Sudan,” The Italian Spectator (November 2024). ABSTRACT: The entanglement of domestic and geopolitical dynamics with the evolution of the aid strategies of the Gulf States is particularly evident in the Horn of Africa (HOA), where the regional competition for exercising influence has affected the modalities of humanitarian and development interventions. A comparison of the foreign aid given by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Sudan in the context of its political and humanitarian crisis during three different periods (2014-17; 2017-19; and post-2019) allows a better understanding of these dynamics. By adopting a neoclassical realist and constructivist approach, it highlights similarities and differences in the domestic factors at play, including the ideological and security dimension, in both donor and recipient countries, as well as their overlapping with the regional and international spheres, which determine aid strategies in terms of the geographical, channel and sectoral allocation of aid resources.

Adélie Chevée, “Narrating Against Uncertainty: Newspaper Documentation in the Syrian Revolutionary Movement,” Political Studies (November 2024). ABSTRACT: This article theorizes documentation in narratives – the process by which activists gather and write evidence of facts to build a coherent mobilization narrative. Focusing on narrating (the process) rather than narrative use, it argues that documentation in newspapers reflected the goal of ‘making sense’ in a context of uncertainty. To do so, it fledges the probative value of narratives, their capacity to convey stories not only with plots, characters and emotions but also through the logic of proof. Building on a sample analysis of Syrian revolutionary newspapers published after the 2011 Uprising, it shows how documentation helped build the opposition narrative with fact-finding and individual storytelling. When the regime denied the existence of protests and repression, revolutionary newspapers helped document the social movement (with photos and testimonies of protest) and the repression (with lists and testimonies of victims). In doing so, this article shows that documenting became an act of mobilization.

Neil Ketchley and Gilad Wenig, “Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State: Evidence From the 1952 Egyptian Revolution,” Comparative Political Studies (November 2024). ABSTRACT: The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calculation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the careers of 674 high-ranking officials in Egypt following the Free Officers’ seizure of power in July 1952. A multilevel survival analysis shows that officials connected to Egypt’s deposed monarch and very senior officials were most vulnerable to being purged. Experienced bureaucrats and those with university education were more likely to be retained. This threat-competence calculation also informed which ministries experienced more purging. Qualitative triangulation with biographies, memoirs, newspaper reports, and speeches corroborates the mechanism. The findings show why radical state-led change often requires a degree of elite-level continuity.