MENA Academy Weekly Roundup #10

Academic responses to Gaza's devastation, and the latest from the academic journals

Welcome back to the weekly MENA Academy Roundup of new academic journal articles about the Middle East and North Africa. The crisis in Gaza last week knocked us off our regular schedule, and then a family medical crisis knocked us back even more. It was almost too much to bear watching Israel deprive Gaza’s hospitals of fuel, bombard them and drive the entire health care system past the point of collapse; watching premature babies at risk of death while my own child fought her own battles in the NIC Unit. There is increasing clarity around the world that there can be absolutely no justification for the scale and devastation of Israel’s blockade and assault on Gaza, and an urgent need for a ceasefire to allow for adequate humanitarian relief (not a token 20 trucks and a photo op). The horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attack do not and can not justify inflicting untold atrocities on a captive civilian population.

It’s slightly reassuring that Israel has thus far held off on the ground invasion which many believed would start many days ago; it seems that the chorus of warnings by academics, analysts, NGOs and governments about the likely catastrophic consequences of such an assault have had some effect on Israeli decisions. It’s good to see the breadth and strength of the emergent analytical consensus against a ground invasion across most of the foreign policy community, despite their disagreements on so many other issues; profound shame on those who continue to justify these indefensible policies. Let’s hope that the gathering diplomatic efforts for a humanitarian pause accelerate further and are able to persuade Israel to change its plans. But that is cold comfort as the blockade and heavy bombardment takes an inexorable civilian toll, thousands upon thousands of dead civilians - including, at last report, over 2000 children — and so many more at risk.

Israel and Gaza have been a major topic of discussion around the academy this week. Jadaliyya is hosting a collaborative teach-in on Gaza, with a lot of outstanding academics offering their thoughts and experience: Ziad Abu-Rish, Fida Adely, Aslı Bali, Rana Barakat, Rochelle Davis, Beshara Doumani, Noura Erakat, Adel Iskandar, Maya Mikdashi, Sherene Seikaly, Lisa Wedeen participated in the first session with Bassam Haddad. There have been a lot of events, online and otherwise, hosted by universities, think tanks, and other organizations, which I don’t have the bandwidth to track down but shouldn’t be hard to find.

There have been a number of academic open letters and official statements issued by related institutions, including (but not limited to - feel free to let me know if I’ve missed any). Here are professional associations: Middle East Studies Association (October 16); American Studies Association: Statement on Gaza; Middle East Section (MES) of the American Anthropological Association and the Association of Middle East Anthropology (AMEA) of the Middle East Studies Association, Joint Statement on the Ongoing War Against Gaza. I have been unable to locate a statement from the American Political Science Association; read into that what you will.

Here are some important open letters. I don’t sign any open letters, but feel free to so if you consider it an effective form of political action. This one has a lot of signatories active within the POMEPS network: Academic Experts: An Open Letter to the Governments of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and all EU member states and EU institutions on Israel/Palestine and the Gaza crisis. Other letters include: Open Letter: Sociologists in Solidarity With Gaza; ; #CeasefireNow: Open Call for an Immediate Ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Israel (Change.Org Petition).

And now, if you’re so inclined despite these dark days, let’s get back to our weekly roundup of academic journal articles on the Middle East and North Africa.

First, some updates. Please check out our GOOD CHAT on the meaning and dynamics of occupation, featuring Diana Greenwald, Dana El Kurd, Alexander Downes and David Edelstein, which Elizabeth Saunders expertly pinch-hitting for me as host. Last week I joined Suzanne Maloney and Foreign Affairs editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan for a really good hour long conversation about Gaza. You can listen to it here or on their Spotify feed. And on our own Middle East Political Science Podcast, last week’s episode featured a conversation with Sofia Fenner about her book Shouting in a Cage and one with Kristian Ulrichsen about Saudia Arabia, the GCC, the Abraham Accords, and the Gaza crisis. Listen here!

The highlight of the academic journals this week is a spectacular new issue of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Hisham Aidi has a fascinating review essay of several books about Gnawa music in Morocco, which incorporates some of his critique of Chouki el-Hamel’s Black Morocco. Highly recommended! It also includes an important symposium on the plight of displaced academics and the reach of transnational repression within and beyond the Middle East. As my GW colleague Ilana Feldman summarizes: the threats to academic freedom are global, and so must be the defense. There is also a timely and important piece by Sophia Goodfriend, “Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron's Old City,” which fits extremely well with research I have coming out on the rise of digital surveillance and its implications for state capacity.

Maria Josua, “Justifications of repression in autocracies: an empirical analysis of Morocco and Tunisia, 2000–2010,” Contemporary Politics (October 2023): ABSTRACT: How do autocrats communicate about repression? Previous studies have analysed how autocratic officials justify the repression of large-scale protests to avoid backlash effects. However, we know much less about how everyday repression against dissidents and ordinary citizens is communicated and justified under authoritarianism. This paper is the first to systematically investigate how officials in autocracies justify, conceal, or deny repression employed by different state actors. It studies the communication of repression in two North African autocracies by analysing the novel Justifications of Repressive Incidents in Morocco and Tunisia Dataset (JuRI). The event dataset contains 439 instances of repression between 2000 and 2010 and disaggregates various dimensions of repression and its communication. The empirical analysis shows how the chosen forms of repression influence ensuing patterns of communication and justification. Studying the communication of repression helps us better understand the nexus of legitimation, judicial repression and political violence in autocracies.

Ala Alrababhah, et al, “The Dynamics of Refugee Return: Syrian Refugees and Their Migration Intentions,” British Journal of Political Science 53, no.4 (published online February 2023). ABSTRACT: We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly. These results challenge traditional models of decision making about migration, where refugees weigh living conditions in the host and home countries (“push” and “pull” factors). We offer an alternative theoretical framework: a model of threshold-based decision making whereby only once a basic threshold of safety at home is met do refugees compare other factors in the host and home country. We explore some empirical implications of this new perspective using qualitative interviews and quantitative survey data.

Paul Macdonald, “Civilized Barbarism: What We Miss When We Ignore Colonial Violence,” International Organization (October 2023). ABSTRACT: Colonial warfare has been a frequent and bloody feature of international relations, yet most studies of wartime civilian victimization focus on either interstate or civil wars. In this article I argue that ignoring colonial violence has distorted our understanding of state-directed violence against civilians in wartime. I introduce a new theory of colonial violence, which focuses on the distinctive strategic, normative, and institutional incentives that colonial powers have to harm civilians. To assess this theory, I introduce and analyze a new data set of 193 cases of colonial war from 1816 to 2003. Using a variety of measures of civilian harm, I find that colonial wars are especially brutal. Three-quarters of states in colonial wars targeted civilians, for example, compared to less than a third of states in interstate wars. But some colonial wars are harder on civilians than others. Colonial powers are more likely to harm civilians when their indigenous adversaries employ guerrilla tactics, when their indigenous adversaries come from a different perceived racial background, and when the colonial state relies on settlers or indigenous intermediaries to help compensate for its relative weakness. By ignoring colonial violence in world politics, we misunderstand the scale and scope of state-directed violence against civilians and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the causes of this brutality.

Richard McAlexander, Michael Rubin and Rob Williams, “They’re Still There, He’s All Gone: American Fatalities in Foreign Wars and Right-Wing Radicalization at Home,” American Political Science Review (October 2023). ABSTRACT: What explains right-wing radicalization in the United States? Existing research emphasizes demographic changes, economic insecurity, and elite polarization. This paper highlights an additional factor: the impact of foreign wars on society at home. We argue communities that bear the greatest costs of foreign wars are prone to higher rates of right-wing radicalization. To support this claim, we present robust correlations between activity on Parler, a predominantly right-wing social media platform, and fatalities among residents who served in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at both the county and census tract level. The findings contribute to understanding right-wing radicalization in the US in two key respects. First, it examines widespread, nonviolent radical-right activity that, because it is less provocative than protest and violence, has eluded systematic measurement. Second, it highlights that U.S. foreign wars have important implications for domestic politics beyond partisanship and voting, to potentially include radicalization.

Killian Clarke, “Revolutionary Violence and Counterrevolution,” American Political Science Review 117, no.4 (published online December 2022). ABSTRACT: What type of revolutions are most vulnerable to counterrevolutions? I argue that violent revolutions are less likely than nonviolent ones to be reversed because they produce regimes with strong and loyal armies that are able to defeat counterrevolutionary threats. I leverage an original dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015, which allows us for the first time to document counterrevolutionary emergence and success worldwide. These data reveal that revolutions involving more violence are less at risk of counterrevolution and that this relationship exists primarily because violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—but not counterrevolutionary emergence. I demonstrate mechanisms by comparing Cuba’s nonviolent 1933 uprising (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its 1959 revolutionary insurgency (which defeated multiple counterrevolutions). Though nonviolence may be superior to violence when it comes to toppling autocrats, it is less effective in bringing about lasting change and guaranteeing that these autocrats never return.

Ragui Assaad and Caroline Krafft, “Labour market dynamics and youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa: Evidence from Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia,” Labour (October 2023). ABSTRACT: Although it is well-established in the literature that unemployment is a labour market insertion problem in the Middle East and North Africa, the dynamics driving unemployment remain poorly understood. Using data from the Labor Market Panel Surveys in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, we offer insights into youth unemployment by studying flows into and out of unemployment. Female youth and Tunisian youth of both genders are particularly likely to experience long periods of unemployment. Educated youth from higher socioeconomic status backgrounds are more likely to experience unemployment, but there is not a strong relationship between background and unemployment duration.

Finally, check out this POLAR dialogue with Omar Dewachi on “War Biology as Aftermath of Empire” about his research on Iraq. Fascinating and important… and deeply relevant to Gaza’s ongoing trauma and what’s to come.