MENA Academy Weekly #12 (11.10.2023)

A spectacular new issue of the APSA MENA Politics Newsletter, and more!

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for the MENA Academy’s weekly roundup of new publications! First off, be sure to listen to this week’s episode of the Middle East Political Science podcast, which features a conversation with Anne Irfan about her book Refuge and Resistance (which I reviewed here a few weeks ago). It’s a much needed history of UNRWA, based on unique access to the organization’s archives, which really details the complex dynamics of international assistance to Palestinian refugees after 1948. It couldn’t be more relevant at a time that Israel has been pushing for the mass transfer of Palestinian from Gaza into the Sinai - a demand which has been rejected forcefully by Egypt and, perhaps surprisingly, by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an important statement in Tokyo on US principles for Gaza’s future which included “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza – not now, not after the war." I will have a lot more to say about this issue soon — look out for a piece next week.

Listen to Anne Irfan and me talk about her book here:

The featured MENA Politics publication this week is the fall issue of the APSA’s MENA Politics Newsletter. I edited the Newsetter for its first three years before handing it off to the superstar editorial team of Nermin Allam, Gamze Cavdar, and Sean Yom. They’ve definitely improved it, and the new issue is just spectacular. The issue leads with an essay on responsible scholarship in and on the Middle East by the great Lisa Anderson. Reflecting on the wave of arrests, harrassment and killing of scholars across the region over the last half decade, Anderson observes that “the accumulation of such stories is disheartening, as the harassment and detentions themselves are intended to be. In much of the region, research and researchers are often regarded as, at best, tradable commodities; at worst, a significant danger to social peace and cohesion—or at least to regime stability.” Anderson then reveals some of the key findings of the multiyear collaborative REMENA project (Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa). I highly recommend that everyone in our scholarly community read and reflect upon it (you can listen to me talk with Anderson and Rabab El Mahdi about the project here).

The Newsletter then features several symposium sections, each bringing together a wide range of scholars with short interventions on a single theme. First, there’s a research symposium on judicial politics, organized by Lihi Bin Shitrit and Gamze Cavdar, featuring Mona el-Ghobashy (Egypt), Alon Yakter (Israel), Lina Khatib (Lebanon), Ruth Halperin-Kaddari (Israel), and Rola el-Husseini (Lebanon). The second symposium focuses on left wing political movements and politics, organized by Francesco Cavatorta and Gamze Cavdar, featuring Idriss Jebari, Sune Haugbolle, Hesham Sallam, Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Sevgi Adak, Avi Shilon, Khalid Dhabi, and an interview with Gilbert Achcar. Finally, there is a fantastic roundtable on the ethics of research in conflict situations featuring Anne Irfan, Kevin Mazur, Sarah Parkinson, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl.

Congratulations to the whole MENA Politics editorial team for another great issue of the Newsletter! Here’s some other interesting articles published last week:

Zahra Ali, “The Political in Iraq’s Thawra Teshreen: Gender, Space, and Emancipation,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (30 October 2023). ABSTRACT: This article explores the meaning and significance of the political in the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly called Thawra Teshreen, through the lens of gender, space, and emancipation. It looks at the spatiality of the protests, considering both discursive and material dimensions and centering the experience of the gendered body. At the same time, it breaks with binary lenses of agency and resistance and with preconceived and universalist notions of rights and claims to representation, instead proposing a situational understanding of power and subjectivation. The article analyzes the gendered and sexual dimensions of Thawra Teshreen and explores the discursive, material, and imaginary space production through the massive corporeal presence in the streets and cybermobilization. It shows that protesters have put forward their own politics of life and death in mobilizing against the political, structural, and infrastructural forces of death that shape their experiences. It argues that women’s participation constitutes an emancipated subjectivation that goes beyond the identitarian.

Hannah M Ridge, “Wasta and Democratic Attitudes in the Middle East,” Middle East Law and Governance (31 October 2023). ABSTRACT: The Middle East faces ongoing challenges in democratization and in corruption. This article examines the influence of wasta – a Middle Eastern form of clientelism – on citizens’ political attitudes. Although wasta is situated between citizen services and corruption, many citizens view wasta as corrupt. Using Arab Barometer survey data, this article shows that the widespread use of wasta in the Middle East makes citizens less satisfied with their current largely non-democratic governments. Wasta also increases their interest in democracy as an egalitarian alternative regime structure. Wasta users, however, are protective of the personal advantages that wasta networks afford them. Widespread wasta thus represents a challenge to democratization.

Amanda Sahar D’Urso and Tabitha Bonilla, “Religion or Race? Using Intersectionality to Examine the Role of Muslim Identity and Evaluations on Belonging in the United States,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 8, no.2. (2023). ABSTRACT: How do White Americans evaluate the politics of belonging in the United States across different ethnoreligious identity categories? This paper examines this question through two competing frameworks. On the one hand, given the salience of anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States, we consider whether White Americans penalize Muslim immigrants to the United States regardless of their ethnoracial background. On the other hand, Muslim identity is often conflated by the general public with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ethnoracial identity. We argue MENA-Muslim identity should be understood through the lens of intersectionality. In this case, White Americans may penalize MENA-Muslims immigrants to the United States more than Muslims from other ethnoracial groups. We test these two frameworks through a conjoint experimental design wherein respondents are asked to evaluate immigrants and indicate to whom the United States should give a green card—signaling legal belonging—and how likely the immigrant is to assimilate into America—signaling cultural belonging. Although White Americans believe White Muslims may assimilate better to the United States relative to MENA-Muslims, race does not moderate how White Americans evaluate who should be allowed to belong in the United States.

Jonathan Fulton, Li-Chen Sim, and Jean-Loup Samaan, “Gulf states and the Indo-Pacific: agents or objects of geopolitical competition?” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region (2023). ABSTRACT: Special issue on the Gulf and the India-Pacific region, touching on a wide range of themes such as energy interdependence, maritime security, “minilateralism” as a forum for diplomacy, and US-China-India strategic dynamics.