MENA Scholar Spotlight: Stacey Philbrick Yadav

A conversation with the chair of the APSA's MENA Politics Section

Each week, the MENA Scholar Spotlight features an informal conversation with a scholar who works on Middle East and North African politics. This week, the spotlight shines on Stacey Philbrick Yadav of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Yadav succeeded me as the Chair of the APSA MENA Politics Section after several years of service on the POMEPS Steering Committee, and she’s been doing a fabulous job (which I’m so so so happy she’s doing instead of me).

Yadav has been a prolific author on Yemen, especially since 2011. Her first book, Islamists and the State, was a really provocative and unusual comparison of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islah in Yemen. I’m excited to read her new book, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War, which is currently out in the UK but not yet in the United States (though it appears that the Kindle version is already available, if you just can’t wait!). At POMEPS, she collaborated with me on an outstanding conference in Yemen back in 2018 — was it really that long ago? Yikes! - which resulted in this fantastic collection of essays.

Yadav has also been a real pioneer in promoting ethical collaborative research, through her involvement with CARPO (The Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient) which has developed “collaborative models that allow Yemeni researchers to contribute co-equally to knowledge production about the war in a way that itself constitutes Yemeni peacebuilding work.” The ethics of such collaborations is an issue rising in importance as COVID restrictions and war have limited access to the field by Western scholars, making it essential to ensure that research collaborations are not exploitative and that the local scholars are fully equal partners in every stage of the research.

Abu Aardvark: What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Dave Eggers’ The Monk of Mokha, which is in genre that is hard to classify. It’s not quite a biography, though it’s the true story of a Yemeni-American who leaves his job as a doorman in San Francisco to become a coffee importer in the midst of the war in Yemen.  I haven’t finished it, but what I’ve been enjoying most about it is how the storytelling totally collapses the idea of “here” and “there” in its depiction of members of a diasporic community navigating complex personal, political, and economic relationships.

I’m teaching this as the first reading in a new interdisciplinary Global Studies class on “Coffee.”  Each of us teaching the course is supposed to explore the way some “thing” – in my version, coffee – has shaped social practices over time and space. Obviously, as someone whose work focuses on Yemen, I’ve always had an appreciation for Yemen’s place in the coffee trade. A few years ago, I brought a coffee importer to campus to talk about the ethical questions that come up around commodity sourcing in conflict areas.  When the opportunity arose to teach this new course, I knew I’d want to start by thinking about these questions.  Eggers’ book is just right. And now, as my teenager says, I’ve made coffee my whole personality.

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

I know this is cheating, but I’d have to choose a pair – two short “roundtable” essays from IJMES that jointly helped me work through the earliest nuggets of the argument in my new book.  In 2015, I wrote about the way transitional institutions in Yemen had failed to reckon with changes produced through the shared practice of collective action during and after the uprising. Transitional institutions, I argued, had a representational logic that was at odds with the way young activists understood solidarity and difference. The second piece describes the relationship between civil action and opportunities of effective citizenship that exist even in the context of the current war. They may not seem connected but they’re equally important to me because they jointly highlight the puzzle that I’ve tried to address with the book – how and why are civil actors today talking favorably about a set of institutions that were so widely criticized at the time? How have those transitional institutions – flawed as they genuinely were – important to the ways in which Yemeni civil actors think about and work for justice now.  So I’m grateful for those roundtable essays in helping draw that puzzle to the front for me.

What are you currently working on? 

I’m following up on a loose thread at the end of my book. In the last chapter of Yemen in the Shadow of Transition, I argued for reading knowledge-production by Yemeni researchers as a form of “justice work” by civil actors, exploring how Yemeni researchers address representational gaps and shape interpretations of the conflict through their research-based analysis and advocacy.  This argument originated in the observation that – biographically speaking – many of the Yemeni researchers I was citing had been activists at an earlier stage before the war and have shifted their energies toward research. So I started asking people about why they were doing research on the conflict, what they saw their published reports doing, etc.  But I feel like I only scratched the surface of this at the end of the book, so I’ve been pursuing it more systematically since then. In particular, I’ve been thinking about what different forms of narration mean/do from the perspective of political agency.

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

You profiled Jillian Schwedler last week, and she would certainly have been my go-to answer. Over the course of the past two decades, she’s been the MENA politics scholar I’ve most consistently learned from.  I loved watching Protesting Jordan develop and I definitely want someone to fund that gift-shop project she’s got cooking.

But I’m also a huge fan of Sarah Parkinson’s work. If you haven’t yet read her essay in the Rethinking Comparison volume that came out last year, it offers one of the clearest examples of why I love her work. It might be tempting to read her as almost accidentally happening upon things – as with the neural network metaphor that she develops in that chapter – but this owes to the honesty she brings to discussing how we learn and how arguments develop through observation. And once she has an idea or insight, of course, she pursues it tenaciously, as you’ll see in her new book.

I think it’s worth pointing out something that these two scholars have in common. Each of them intentionally integrates theoretical, empirical, and methodological claims. In fact, it’s hard to tease those components apart in their writing, and I’m not sure we’re meant to do so.  The way they work and why they do things the way that they do are intimately connected to the questions they’re asking and the arguments they develop.  Yes, we learn about specific empirical questions through their work, but it’s what readers learn about how to learn that extend their contributions well beyond the scope of Jordanian or Palestinian politics, or the MENA region.  

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

This is less a single resource than a type of resource.  MENA politics scholars ought to be reading and citing more research that originates outside of the academy, particularly “grey literature” like policy reports issued by think tanks and international organizations. With regard to Yemen, most of the academic manuscripts that I see are no longer based on field research at all and haven’t been for years – this makes sense, in light of the profound access limitations, many of which your MENA Scholars Barometer helpfully detailed. But there is a wealth of field-based research being conducted during the war outside of university-based work, much of it by people trained in the social sciences. Most published reports include a discussion of methodology that allows the reader to contextualize the research and understand its limits – it’s true that a lot of this policy-oriented literature explores a truncated set of questions in areas or among populations where research is possible and that’s less than ideal. But I’m worried that there are some contexts in which MENA politics scholars are collectively shrugging our shoulders. That concerns me in two ways.  First, it’s allowing access limitations to shape what we know (or don’t know) more than might be necessary.  Second, a lot of this work is being done by researchers from the countries in question and is written for a global audience. This means that choosing not to read or cite this kind of work as part of “the literature” has a politics that I find hard to defend. My thinking on this is informed by work on Yemen by Yemeni researchers, but I know that similar research exists for other parts of the MENA.  I’d really love to see this engaged more directly in academic work on regional politics.

What's your current favorite MENA food?

OK, that’s easy – shafoot. It’s my favorite Yemeni food, without question, but maybe one of my top five favorite foods of any type.  I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like it, and if you find that person, I’ll eat their share. It’s hard to describe, though, and there are variations.  Imagine four or five layers of lahooh, which is a Yemeni flatbread similar to Ethiopian injera with lots of little holes on the surface.  These layers are covered with chilled, salted buttermilk blended with chopped mint and fresh green chilies.  The the total effect is spicy, salty, creamy, and cool all at once.  When the weather is hot and dry, shafoot is amazingly refreshing and filling.  It’s become an annual request at my neighborhood block party in suburban Rochester. It’s impossible not to love shafoot.

As the MENA Scholars Barometer showed, more of us are doing collaborative research with partners in the region. Why should we do this, and what do we need to think about?

When collaboration works well, it is so terrific. It helps overcome some important barriers to access and you can learn so much more than you might learn alone.  I mean, think about how much we all grow when we workshop a draft, and then imagine that you’re workshopping at every stage of the project, from research design through analysis and writing. 

But collaborative research is also hard work, and it works best when partnerships are thoughtfully and equitably structured from the outset.  There are a whole range of practices involved in research collaboration that can be exploitative and extractive and I’m glad to see MENA politics scholars thinking together as a research community about how to collaborate well (and, perhaps, when not to collaborate). I say I’m glad to see this happen “as a research community” because I don’t know that I think there’s any single institutional fix for some of the ethical challenges involved – whether university policies, the REMENA working group, the ASPA MENA Politics section, etc. On the whole, like you, I was encouraged by the Barometer responses about research collaboration – most folks who engage in collaborative research report pretty equitable practices. But I hope we continue to talk about whether, how, and why to do this kind of research.