MENA Academy Weekly Roundup #8 (9.25.23)

More great academic research on the Middle East, sent from a Scottish castle

This week’s MENA Academy roundup comes to you via Scotland, where POMEPS is partnering with Gerasimos Tsourapsas for a fantastic workshop on rentierism and labor migration at the University of Glasgow. The workshop will result in an issue of the open access POMEPS Studies series — look for it sometime early next year — and perhaps more down the road.

Also, be sure to check out the second episode of this season’s Middle East Political Science podcast. We feature a conversation with Thomas Serres about his new book on Algeria, The Suspended Disaster (I reviewed it here) and a conversation with Lisel Hintz about the Zoom writing workshop she organized for Turkish and Syrian scholars affected by the earthquake and about her fascinating research on Turkish popular culture and politics. Check it out!

Finally, if you’ve made the move from Twitter’s smoking corpse to Bluesky, be sure to join the MENASKY list which I created and curate. It already has more than 100 members, including academics and journalists and all kinds of people interested in the Middle East and North Africa. We’re still working out the kinks, but it’s proving to be a really good way to share articles and to make connections — and you can also use the list to find people to follow.

And now to the roundup! The lead article this week was originally part of a POMEPS workshop on labor politics (see the POMEPS Studies special issue, edited with Dina Bishara and Ian Hartshorn here). Neil Ketchley, Ferdinand Eibl, and Jeroen Gunning debunk some popular conceptions and the historiography of Egypt’s critically important 1977 bread riots, and offer important lessons for how to think about — and how to study — anti-austerity mobilization not just in Egypt but globally. Next, there’s a fascinating piece looking at the problems with the underlying sources in major datasets on military coups, authored by POMEPS-supported Saleh Ben Hammou along with Jonathan Powell and Bailey Sellers; I’m always down for good articles which dig deep into the coding of datasets (if you haven’t read Killian Clarke’s great piece on protest event data, you really should).

Next, Samer Abboud turns a critical eye on Syria’s policies towards the repatriation of refugees. Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio’s develop a new application of Gramsci to Egypt’s revolution and two extremely timely articles about the Abrahamn Accords: Tariq Dana on the evolution of the Israel-UAE strategic alliance, and Dana El-Kurd on the negative effects of the Abraham Accords for Arab democracy.

Neil Ketchley, Ferdinand Eibl, and Jeroen Gunning, “Anti-Austerity Riots in Late Developing States: Evidence from Egypt’s 1977 Bread Riots,” Journal of Peace Research (Early View, 2023). ABSTRACT: In late developing states, labor markets are often segmented as a result of import substitution and political coalitionscentered on the formally employed. Building on insider–outsider and moral economy frameworks from political economy, we theorize that in such contexts labor market insiders develop strong expectations about welfare provision and public transfers that make them more likely to riot against proposed austerity measures. We test our argument with the case of Egypt during the 1977 Bread Intifada, when the announcement of subsidy cuts sparked rioting across the country. To conduct our analysis, we match an original event catalog compiled from Arabic-language sources with disaggregated employment data. Spatial models, rich micro-level data, and the sudden and short-lived nature of the rioting help us to disentangle the importance of an area’s labor force from its location and wider socio-economic context. As we show, despite the diffuse impact of the subsidy cuts, rioting was especially concentrated in areas with labor market insiders – and this is after accounting for a range of plausible alternative explanations. The results suggest that moral economies arising from labor market segmentation can powerfully structure violent opposition to austerity.

Salah ben Hammou, Jonathan Powell, and Bailey Sellers, “Sourcing and Bias in the Study of Coups: Lessons from the Middle East,” International Studies Review (September 2023). ABSTRACT: The last two decades have seen an increased focus on reporting bias in large-N datasets. Research on coups d’etat has similarly increased given the availability of coup datasets. This essay argues that while the availability of such data has pushed scholarship forward, the data collection process behind these efforts remains plagued with limitations common to event datasets. Rather than building on what previous projects have accomplished, researchers have invariably developed “new” datasets that suffer from the same problems as earlier efforts. Specifically, we point to reliance on international news sources such as The New York Time and Keesing’s Record of World Events - without the adequate consultation of regional sources and expertise - as a source of concern. We explore this issue by assessing the coverage of coup events from three country cases from the post-colonial Middle East: Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Our findings show that while existing data on successful and failed coups are largely adequate, scholars interested in coup plots and rumors will require a wider breadth of source material to identify such cases.

Samer Abboud, “‘The Decision to Return to Syria is Not in My Hands’: Syria’s Repatriation Regime as Illiberal Statebuilding,” Journal of Refugee Studies (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Many Syrian refugees are being forcibly repatriated under the guise of the war’s end, while other refugees are returning to Syria voluntarily. Drawing on an interview study with displaced Syrians, and an analysis of conflict-era policy and legal changes, I show how the Syrian government’s repatriation regime has been constructed outside of international norms and practices. An absentee must apply to return through a settlement process in which the state determines who is a ‘loyal returnee’ and thus permitted to return. Returnees must construct a genealogy of loyalty that attributes responsibility for their displacement towards several of the Syrian government’s enemies. Wartime Housing, Land, and Property (HLP) laws have created a surrogate legal category for the displaced as absentee subjects who are targeted for punishment through HLP seizures. As Syria’s repatriation regime is delinked from restitution, returnees are forced to navigate HLP laws to regain ownership of assets and property. OPEN ACCESS

Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio, “Gramsci’s ‘Southern Question’ and the Egyptian Revolution: Intellectuals, Disruption and Subalterity,” Review of African Political Economy (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Authoritarian retrenchment after the Arab Uprisings is explained either by invoking regimes’ disproportionate repressive advantage on civic activists and ‘leaderless’ popular mobilisation, or by pointing to opposition groups’ insufficient preparation or radicalism. A Gramscian approach helps understand why both explanations are unsatisfactory and do little justice to the fluidity of Egyptian politics in 2011-2013. First, it helps understand opposition groups’ revolutionary significance. Specifically, it is clear that despite being couched in moderate terms, opposition groups' ‘reformist’ demands – such as their anti-corruption agenda – were rightly perceived by regime actors as radical challenges before, during and after the Uprisings. Second, while undeniably significant, repressive capacities alone cannot explain the ‘return of the regime’ and the decline in civic activists’ fortunes because they contradict analyses of their importance before the Uprisings. If activists eroded Egypt’s authoritarian regime before the 2011 revolution, what made them unable to continue doing so thereafter? Conversely, if activists’ agency was effective before 2011 despite the regime’s overwhelming coercive capabilities, their post-revolutionary decline cannot be explained by that pre-existing imbalance alone. If activists’ agency cannot be denied before the Revolution, we must account for it thereafter. To explain activists’ post-revolutionary decline while capturing the fluidity of Egypt’s ‘revolutionary moment’, we build on Gramsci’s concept of disgregazione, which plays an important albeit under-researched role in his Notes on the Southern Question and in the Prison Notebooks. In doing so, we also contribute to the rediscovery of Gramsci’s work in Middle East Studies by engaging with lesser-known Italophone Gramscian scholarship.

Tariq Dana, “The New (Dis)Order: The Evolving UAE-Israel Security Alliance,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Sept 2023). ABSTRACT: The normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel under the Abraham Accords is part of a long-standing security cooperation between the two regimes to monopolize regional power. Indeed, with the rapidly changing political and security landscape in the Arab world, the Abraham Accords have become central to understanding alliance formation in the region. The Accords have significantly enhanced the already existing security and military relations between Israel and the UAE, with heavy Emirati investment in advanced Israeli weapons systems and security technologies, military and intelligence sharing, as well as ­economic partnerships in strategic sectors. While the alliance is often portrayed as a defensive security arrangement aimed at countering the “Iranian threat,” a closer examination reveals that it is much more than that. Sponsored by the United States, the alliance entrenches Israeli settler colonialism and Arab authoritarianism as mutually inclusive pillars for the region, with the ultimate objective of reproducing US hegemony in the face of changing global dynamics.

Dana El Kurd, “The Paradox of Peace: The Impact of Normalization With Israel on the Arab World,” Global Studies Quarterly (September 2023). ABSTRACT: How can peace initiatives facilitate authoritarian practices? Peace initiatives that do not address the root causes of conflict, and maintain structural violence, can facilitate authoritarian practices through both material and discursive mechanisms. I use the recent steps towards normalization and, in some instances, peace agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states to make this argument. I examine this dynamic across Gulf Cooperation Council states with varying authoritarian practices and ties to Israel. This paper contributes to our understanding of the impacts of illiberal peace and how it functions, transnationally and at varying levels within and outside state authority.