MENA Academy Weekly Roundup #9 (10.02.23)

Announcing a new POMEPS STUDIES on urban politics, and other great stuff!

Welcome back to the MENA Academy! Apologies for missing last week’s book review essay and being a day late with today’s roundup, but it’s been a crazy week and a half. Last week I flew to sunny Scotland for a two day workshop on migration and refugees at the University of Glasgow, co-hosted with Gerasimos Tsourapsas, and then visited the University of Edinburgh for a day. From there I went on to Tunis for a second POMEPS workshop, this one on the legacies of Frantz Fanon in the Middle East, co-organized with Laryssa Chomiak of CEMAT and Lisa Wedeen. Publications from both workshops should be out in the early spring. When I returned home, I experienced a whole other thing which really puts the Abu in Abu Aardvark; more on that later!

While I was on the road, the fourth episode of this year’s season of the Middle East Political Podcast dropped. It features a conversation with Ora Szekely of Clark University about her new book Syria Divided, recently published in my Columbia University Press series; you may remember my review of the book. I also talk to Wendy Pearlman of Northwestern University about her research with Syrian refugees and the uses of oral history in political science. We also talked about her plans for the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics, which she has just taken over as co-editor (with the also great Ana Arjona; it’s genuinely thrilling to have a MENA specialist in such a leading position in our field, and super great one at that! Listen to the podcast here.

And now, on to the weekly roundup. Up first is something I’m really excited about: POMEPS STUDIES 49: Urban Politics in the Middle East. This collection, which I edited, originated in a February 2023 workshop at the American University of Beirut, co-organized with Mona Harb (Beirut Urban Lab) and Sami Atallah’s The Policy Initiative, Jillian Schwedler, and Sarah El-Kazaz. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of outstanding young scholars, along with a great group of more senior scholars who’ve written on the themes of urban politics. As Harb, Schwedler and I write in our introduction to the collection, “the authors assembled in Beirut pushed to shift the lens towards multi-scalar ethnographic modes of inquiry, highlighting the materialities and relationalities of the hyper-local, examining sites and places which concentrate power dynamics that Janine Clark, Sarah el-Kazaz, Mona Harb and Lana Salman called “as politically consequential as [global and] national-level practices and institutions, if not more so” (in Lynch, Schwedler and Yom’s The Political Science of the Middle East, 258).” The essays focused on spatializing the study of urban politics, with keen attention to the politics of infrastructure and the distinctive modes of urban sociality which shape the contours of political life in MENA cities. Download the open access collection here!

And now, around the journals. This week we feature an outstanding special issue of Middle East Report on journalism and transnational repression; Ferdinand Eibl and Steffen Hertog’s APSR piece on rentier states and welfare provision; Christopher Barrie’s analysis of the microdynamics of revolutionary protest in Tunisia; Aytuk Öztürk’s article on developmentalist narratives and pro-regime propaganda in Turkey; Liran Harsgor and Alon Akter’s troubling (if unsurprising) finding that not even COVID-19 could overcome Israeli-Palestinian divides; and Alireza Raisi’s discussion of the impact of conflict with Iran on sectarian attitudes across the Middle East. For those keeping score at home, that’s MENA research in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Journal of Conflict Resolution all in one week. Happy reading!

You won’t want to miss the new issue of the always essential Middle East Report (which is, as always, open access and free to download). Edited by Hesham Sallam, Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Marc Owen Jones and Kevin Schwartz, the special issue focuses on journalism, activism and transnational repression in the Middle East. Here’s how they frame the issue’s scope: “What does the increasingly transnational scale of repression mean for journalists and activists in the Middle East and North Africa and in diaspora? How do individuals and collectives give voice and visibility to the realities in which they live, write and organize in the face of ever more sophisticated attempts to silence them? How can we disentangle the cross-border web of surveillance technologies, Big Tech and authoritarian regimes? … They reveal how state repression is enabled and extended by coordination across borders, as technologies of surveillance and control are shared and refined to devastating effects. At the same time, they highlight how mediascapes and struggles for transformation respond to—and subvert—power in ways that make use of transnationalism, building platforms that creatively provide support to those targeted by repression and alliances that amplify calls for justice." Includes articles by Marc Owen Jones, Abdullah Moasmes, Marwa Fatfata, Thomas Serres, and Mirjam Edel; several co-authored pieces; and an interview with Mo Najem of SMEX. Great to read this aside our POMEPS STUDIES 43 on digital authoritarianism.

Ferdinand Eibl and Steffen Hertog, “From Rents to Welfare: Why Are Some Oil-Rich States Generous to Their People?” American Political Science Review (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Why do some, but not all oil-rich states provide generous welfare to their populations? Building on a case study of Oman in the 1960s and 1970s, we argue that anti-systemic subversive threats motivate ruling elites in oil states to use welfare as a tool of mass co-optation. We use the generalized synthetic control method and difference-in-difference regressions for a global quantitative test of our argument, assessing the effect of different types of subversion on a range of long-term welfare outcomes in oil-rich and oil-poor states. We demonstrate that the positive effect of subversion appears limited to center-seeking subversive threats in oil-rich countries. The paper addresses a key puzzle in the literature on resource-rich states, which makes contradictory predictions about the impact of resource rents on welfare provision.

Christopher Barrie, “The Process of Revolutionary Protest: Development and Democracy in the Tunisian Revolution,” Perspectives on Politics (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

Aytuk Öztürk, “Whisper sweet nothings to me Erdogan: developmentalist propaganda, partisan emotions, and economic evaluations in Turkey,” Democratization (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Economic explanations are central to our understanding of popular support for authoritarian regimes. Yet, we do not know to what extent economic evaluations of citizens living under these regimes are amenable to regime propaganda. This article engages with this question by relying on the case of Turkey, where the authoritarian regime led by Erdoğan has been able to sustain its popular support despite years of economic decline. A national developmentalist narrative has been central to the regime’s economic propaganda in Turkey since 2011. Relying on national face-to-face survey data, I first demonstrate that economic misperceptions grounded in this narrative are widespread among supporters of the ruling coalition in Turkey. I then use an online survey experiment to show that exposure to the developmentalist narrative improves economic evaluations among ruling coalition voters. These effects are mediated through the increase in partisan emotions, and they are especially large for non-partisan voters of the ruling coalition. These results help us understand how Erdoğan’s regime could sustain its popular support despite years of economic decline. From a broader perspective, this article demonstrates that scholars of authoritarian regimes need to pay more attention to economic narratives and their affective structures. **OPEN ACCESS**

Liran Harsgor and Alon Akter, “Public Preferences for Intergroup Assistance in Conflicts Facing Joint External Threats: Lessons From COVID-19 in Israel,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (September 2023). ABSTRACT: With global changes, large-scale natural hazards are more frequent and intense, posing a particular challenge for groups in conflict. Do these shared external threats influence group willingness to cooperate and assist the adversary, and how? The literature suggests inconsistent expectations, from increased intergroup cooperation, to exacerbated animosity, to no discernable impact. We explore this question in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a joint exogenous threat for both sides. Using multiple surveys and a conjoint experiment, we examine whether and how COVID-19 threat perceptions affected Jewish-Israeli preferences for collaborating with the Palestinians against the pandemic, including a novel exploration of concrete policy priorities. We find that greater COVID-19 threat perceptions have little effect on collaborative policy preferences, corroborating politics-as-usual arguments: support for out-group assistance, cooperation, and cost-sharing is polarized by ideological orientation. Our findings outline both constraints and opportunities for intergroup collaboration policies in conflicts facing joint outside challenges.

Alireza Raisi, “Alliance and sectarian attitudes in the MENA: the case of Arab opinion towards Iran,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (September 2023). ABSTRACT: Despite a growing body of analyses on sectarian tensions in the MENA, few have examined the impact of sectarian attitudes on public opinion towards the regional powers. Drawing from a statistical analysis of public opinion polls and the case study of Egypt and Sudan, the paper examines determinants of public attitudes towards Iran in the post-Arab spring era. The analysis indicates that public attitudes towards the regional player, i.e. Iran influenced by the alliance in the MENA. Although the Arab spring fuelled the negative sentiments towards Iran in the allies of Saudi Arabia, strong ties between Iran and the Islamist rule shaped positive attitudes towards Iran in Sudan. The analysis further reveals the impact of Salafi’s anti-Iran campaigns in Egypt. This campaign utilizes negative symbolism and ethnoreligious myths to depict Shias as an enemy and construct an existential threat from Iran. In this environment, the symbolic politics and emotionally laden hatred in the Arab countries explain the sectarian attitudes towards Shias and Iran.