MENA Scholar Spotlight: Francesco Cavatorta

Each Friday, I spotlight a leading scholar of MENA politics, with a casual conversation about their interests.

Francesco Cavatorta is a professor of political science at Universite Laval in Quebec. When he joined the POMEPS steering committee this year, he became its second Canada-based scholar - and the only one from a Francophone institution. He’s written widely about the comparative politics of the Middle East, and has a new edition out of his co-authored (with Vincent Durac) textbook Politics and Governance in the Middle East.

Francesco is incredibly prolific, producing both a lot of articles and really high quality ones. I won’t even try to mention everything he’s done, just the ones that really stood out to me. He’s written a lot about Tunisia, especially the Ennahda movement — check out his recent open access piece “From victim to hangman? Ennahda, Salafism and the Tunisian Transition” for a taste, as well as his then-prescient piece with Fabio Merone on “moderation through exclusion” which anticipated Rached Ghannouchi’s effort to rebrand Ennahda away from Islamism. Along with Michelle Pace, he edited one of the first journal special issues on the theoretical issues raised by the Arab uprisings - they even beat me to the punch!

There’s two projects I want to highlight. Francesco recently co-edited a special issue with the wonderful Italian scholar Paola Rivetti on revolution and counter-revolution, highlighting “how transnational developments have influenced the scholarship on SWANA/MENA politics, highlighting a number of epistemological breaks in the content and process of knowledge production.” Their co-authored introduction is simply terrific, one of the best synthetic think-pieces I’ve read in a while - especially its highlighting of the value of rethinking the geographic boundaries of the Middle East (an issue near to my heart in recent years), the importance of South-South comparisons, the need to rethink concepts of democracy and democratization, and the urgency of understanding violence as a structural issue. As if that’s not enough, he co-edited another special issue with the equally wonderful Janine Clark taking stock of a decade of Arab political mobilization since 2011. Both special issues highlight his own theoretical creativity and empirical depth — and, even more, the collaborative spirit which he brings to the study of MENA politics.

Let’s welcome Francesco Cavatorta to the MENA Scholar Spotlight!

What are you reading right now?

I am reading two books at the moment. The first one is not necessarily related to the Middle East and to my research. I am reading The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock. I find the hubris, incompetence and lies he describes perversely fascinating. The second book I am reading is an edited volume by Laure Guirguis, The Arab Lefts. It is a history of the different trajectories of the left across the Arab world. It provides a great account of leftist politics across the region between the 1950s and the 1970s and one then detect what kind of legacy what these ‘lefts’ have left today. I highly recommend it.    

What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?

Most of my publications are on one aspect or another of Arab politics or the international politics of the region. It might therefore seem strange to say that my favourite published piece is a 2010 article about what I called the convergence of governance. The article tries to demonstrate how the way in which governance and public policies are increasingly similar across different regimes, be they democratic, anocratic or authoritarian. It was published in Middle East Critique as part of a special issue and it is my favourite because I think it anticipated some of the debates we have had since then about the way in which democracies have increasingly relied on authoritarian measures and means to govern while authoritarian systems have attempted to use pseudo-democratic institutions and values to govern. It is a very broad comparative piece and maybe that is also why I really enjoyed doing research for it and writing it. It allowed me to go beyond my area expertise and while I can see it has quite a few problems, I also think that these broad comparative pieces are useful to detect global trends and ensure that ‘Arab exceptionalism’ is at least questioned.      

What are you currently working on?

I am working on three collaborative projects. The first one is about coalition governments in the Arab world. The idea is to use the theories and methods employed in broader comparative politics to examine the duration and composition of coalitions in several Arab countries. There is special issue in the pipelines. The second project is something that I have been meaning to do for quite some time and thanks to a great group of colleagues it is finally being done. We are revisiting the categories Wiktorowicz used to provide an understanding of the relationship between politics and Salafism to argue that what has happened since the early 2010s has fundamentally changed the categories and we should understand Salafism differently. The third project is about measuring the attitudes, values and policy preferences of Islamist parties’ members. We are still in the very early stages of the project, but the idea is to import the way in which party members are studied in different political systems in Europe, North and South America into the Arab world.

What’s your dream research project (and why haven't you done it yet)?

My colleague Fabio Merone and I have been thinking about writing a book about the similarities between Tunisian Islamism and Italian communism. Having both worked on Tunisian Islamism for a long time and having more than of a passing knowledge of the Italian communist party, we always thought that Islamists should not be compared to Christian Democracy, but to Euro-Communist parties, especially the Italian one. The trajectories of both parties are very similar. We have not done yet because we are not sure we would be able to have the funding necessary to do it. Who would be interested in this kind of project? We never could provide a satisfactory answer to this.      

What scholar(s) besides yourself do you think is currently doing the most interesting work on MENA politics?

I have had the opportunity to be on the APSA-MESA book committee and had the pleasure to read several outstanding works. Mona El-Ghobashy wrote a most wonderful book and so did Khaled Medani. I am always impressed by Janine Clark’s work and I have been extremely lucky to collaborate with her on a couple of projects. She is absolutely brilliant and I think her forthcoming work will be inspiring not only for me, but for a lot of scholars out there. I also recently had the pleasure to host Jillian Schwedler at my university and her book and presentation are fascinating.  There are then a plethora of amazing younger scholars doing wonderful work on contentious politics, feminism, and mobilization. I am thinking about Marwa Shalaby for instance or Lihi Ben Shitrit and Ian Hartshorn. This is stuff I am not very knowledgeable about and I am keen to learn about.

What’s one resource / opportunity that you wish more MENA politics scholars knew about and took advantage of?

I think that there are maybe more opportunities for collaboration than we think when it comes to joint funding between scholars based in Canada, the US and Europe. Quebec (provincial government) and Canada (federal government), where I am based, have quite a few programmes that encourage cross-border collaborations and I do not think that we – Canada based-scholars – are necessarily aware of them and are quite reluctant to involve colleagues based outside Canada.

What MENA shows are you watching these days?

I have to admit I have a very soft spot for the Netflix series Fauda. It has its problems of course, but I am drawn to the protagonist. He is fundamentally a terrible human being because he is a serial betrayer. He betrays in the name of defending a state which is in fact ‘forcing’ individuals to become terrible human beings even though they might be inclined naturally to behave terribly. This is not necessarily spelled out in the series, but this is what I get and it is of course just my own very personal interpretation. Having lived in Israel for quite some time I am also interested in the dynamics the TV series shows and I can see some glimpses of what I saw when there.   

What do you do when you are not working?

I have to say that I spend most of my free time playing, watching and talking about football (soccer). I have an encyclopedic nerdy knowledge of anything football-related; it is quite embarrassing at times. However, this knowledge has come in very handy in complicated situations when I had to deal with suspicious border guards and security personnel across the region  as well as building relations and breaking the ice with people I met. Football is a key that unlocks many doors.