MENA Academy Weekly Roundup #6 (9.11.23)
All the best new research and publications on Middle East politics!
A massive earthquake devastated Morocco on September 8, the strongest to hit the country in more than a century, with the city of Marrakesh and a wide swathe of mountain communities in the southwest particularly damaged. Almost 2500 people have been reported dead, but the toll is likely much higher. A number of academics, NGOs and other concerned souls have organized campaigns to raise funds and provide desperately needed assistance to devastated communities. If you’re able and interested, here are some resources:
Earthquake Relief Resources (via Fayrouz Yousfi)
Morocco Earthquake Relief GoFundMe (group of academics led by Brahim El Guabli of my old home Williams College)
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Now, for this week’s MENA Academy Roundup of new articles from academic journals. First up is a piece by Valerie de Koiejer, Sarah Parkinson, and Sofia Smith shinging light on the social practices of sexual harassment in humanitarian aid communities based on ethnographic experience in Uganda and Iraq; this is a critically important but underdiscussed topic with implications well beyond those specific communities, and it’s good to see the paper now published. Then we have a gripping piece by Ariel Ahram on environmental devastation and genocidal practice in Iraqi Kurdistan; I’ve been seeing bits and pieces of Ahram’s work on environmental violence in Iraq for years, and this is an important addition to that growing body of research. Adam Przeworski’s article (self-)critiquing formal models of authoritarianism isn’t specifically about the Middle East, but it’s just so darned good that you need to read it.
The roundup also includes Dana El-Kurd’s discussion of the ongoing challenges to decolonizing the discipline of International Relations in the Arab world, Alexander de la Paz’s analysis of Iraq’s use of American and Japanese human shields during the 1990-91 Gulf War, Narges Bajoghli’s sweeping analysis of mediated visibility and political mobilization, and a study of the personal family victimization in the Holocaust and broader political socialization effects on Israeli political attitudes by Carly Wayne, Taylor Damann, and Shani Fachter. It’s another rich crop of MENA political research: get all the links and read the abstracts here!
Valerie de Koiejer, Sarah Parkinson, and Sofia Smith, “‘It’s Just How Things Are Done’: Social Ecologies of Sexual Violence in Humanitarian Aid,” International Studies Quarterly (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Increasing research on the humanitarian sector examines how its organizational cultures affect both aid outcomes and humanitarian workers’ private lives. The #MeToo movement and several public scandals have brought to light patterns of sexual violence in crisis zones perpetrated by humanitarian aid workers; surveys suggest rates of sexual assault within the humanitarian community comparable to, if not higher than, those on US college campuses. How do the conditions that produce sexual violence persist in a sector governed by strong, mission-centric principles, professional codes of conduct, and oversight? This article uses participant observation in Iraq and Uganda, in-depth interviews, and textural analysis to examine the social origins of sexual violence in humanitarian communities. It builds on studies of aid organizations to argue that the humanitarian sector operates similarly to a “total institution” (Goffman 1961). Then, it draws upon recent work on sexual violence to demonstrate how within-sector social ecologies and informal socialization practices create the conditions of possibility for sexual violence. It identifies two key factors that constitute the emergency aid world—sexual scripts and projects, and sector-specific sexual geographies—and argues that they produce conditions that facilitate sexual violence while labeling them “just how things are done.”
Ariel Ahram, “‘There Should Be No Life’: Environmental Perspectives on Genocide in Northern Iraq,” Journal of Genocide Research (September 2023). ABSTRACT: This article examines the natural environment during the Kurdish genocide in northern Iraq. The genocide killed between 50,000 and 180,000 people and destroyed some 4,500 Kurdish villages from the 1960s to 1980s, reach peak violence during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). The paper uses American, British, and Iraqi archival documents to analyse how the violence affected the natural landscape and how ecological conditions constrained the violence. Iraqi leaders regarded dams and other modes of environmental engineering as levers to facilitate agricultural modernization and social integration. Protecting and projecting hydraulic power justified greater military exertion. Iraqi leaders, frustrated by the lack of progress in development and hostile to the claims of Kurdish nationalism, resorted to more coercive options to combat guerrillas. But the inadequacies of military exertion prompted the government to redouble efforts to tame unruly nature and those who dwelled in it. This escalation contributed significantly to the lethal violence against rural Kurdish society. At a theoretical level, these findings highlight the troubling ways in which policies aimed to improve environmental conditions fold into campaigns of mass violence. The article also adds to understanding of violence in Iraq, showing how Iraq’s attempts to use environmental engineering for development intersected with security concerns and ethnic marginalization to create more intensive repression.
Adam Przeworski, “Formal Models of Authoritarian Regimes: A Critique,” Perspectives on Politics (September 2023). ABSTRACT: The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to predict actions. They are often too abstract to generate testable predictions. “Support” for any regime is difficult to assess.
Dana El Kurd, “Elusive Decolonization of IR in the Arab World,” Review of International Studies (July 2023). ABSTRACT: Arab social science scholarship, and IR in particular, has been systematically underfunded and sidelined by governments across the region. As such, IR scholars in the Arab world have struggled to produce scholarship in hostile and authoritarian environments, let alone address efforts to decolonise. Of the few initiatives of indigenising social science that exist in the Arab world, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI) and its founding institution, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS), are the main examples. In this intervention, I will review the attempts to indigenise and decolonise IR within these institutions. I focus on how the DI is implementing three main approaches: increasing access to the discipline, rethinking how we teach IR, and facilitating theory production from the region. I demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the three abovementioned approaches by drawing attention to performative measures on the part of regional scholars, and pretending localism on the part of scholars in the Global North, which together help to perpetuate neomarginalisation. The shortcomings discussed permeate and distort attempts to decolonise the discipline within the Arab world.
Alexander de la Paz, “Human Shields and the Gulf War,” International Studies Quarterly (September 2023). ABSTRACT: From late August to early December 1990, Iraq held hundreds of Western and Japanese civilians at strategic sites as “human shields” against the Gulf War coalition. While there is a consensus that these foreign nationals would have influenced the coalition’s offensive had they not been released before the onset of hostilities, their impact remains poorly understood. This note draws on newly available archival records, among other sources, to throw new light on this old question. The record shows that leaders were reconciled with the prospect of hostage casualties and the expected political fallout. Military necessity and limited intelligence about the hostages’ whereabouts precluded avoiding every shielded target. At the same time, public opinion was divided on the hostage problem, especially in the United States. In response, leaders planned to take special precautionary measures and mount a rescue operation in Kuwait City. These measures, overall, appeared to exceed those employed for other targets, and exposed coalition forces to additional risks. US decision-makers may also have been motivated by the belief that proceeding undeterred could discourage others from resorting to the same stratagem in the future. The findings advance research on the Gulf War and the problem of human shields in war.
Narges Bajoghli, “Social Movements, Power, and Mediated Visibility,” Annual Review of Anthropology (Early View, September 2023). ABSTRACT: This article focuses on how the anthropological study of media—through an examination of its production, circulation, and consumption—elucidates issues of social organization, political economy, and alternative visions for political futures. By bringing together the studies of visual media, social movements, and hegemonic power by anthropologists and ethnographers of media since the turn of the twenty-first century, this review article provides a critical understanding of research about our current media environment, where scholarship within anthropology is heading in these domains, and what looking at these three fields together can mean for a more robust understanding of our political, social, and cultural futures.
Carly Wayne, Taylor Damann, and Shani Fachter, “The Holocaust, the Socialization of Victimhood, and Outgroup Political Attitudes in Israel,” Comparative Political Studies (September 2023). ABSTRACT: How does historical victimization and its memorialization impact present-day outgroup attitudes in conflict-riven societies? This study explores this question using a survey experiment with a representative sample of 2000 Jewish Israelis—half of whom are direct descendants of Holocaust survivors—and a content analysis of 98 state-approved school textbooks, examining how histories of victimization become socialized and shape political attitudes. We find that, in Israel, family victimization during the Holocaust plays surprisingly little role in shaping present-day attitudes toward outgroups. Rather, perceived historical victimization of the Jewish and Israeli people is broadly socialized among the Israeli public and is a stronger predictor of outgroup (in)tolerance. These findings shed light on the power of societal victimhood narratives—even in the absence of personal family histories of victimization—to shape political attitudes in conflict contexts, with long-term implications for intergroup cooperation and conflict.