MERIP on Palestine, Tamazgha Studies and...

All the new research in MENA Weekly Roundup #19 (02.09.24)

Welcome to this week’s Middle East Academy’s Weekly Roundup, your one stop source for the newest and best academic publications on the Middle East and North Africa (and whatever else catches my eye).

This week’s roundup leads with a fantastic new issue of Middle East Report, always one of the premiere platforms for thoughtful, incisive and deeply informed analysis of the region. Issue 309 — which is, as always, full open access — focuses on Palestine before and after October 7. It leads with a fascinating conversation between Riya Al’Sanah and Haifa-based Palestinian feminist Soheir Asaad about the lessons of 1948’s Nakba for today’s horrific situation. The second lead features Lisa Hajjar clinically dissecting “Gaza as a crime scene” rather than war with an intentinally shocking comparison to the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. The issue then tours the region, with Hesham Sallam on Egyptian public opinion and Sisi’s political dilemmas; Samar Alwan on mobilization in support of Gaza in the Gulf; Jillian Schwedler on the limits of protest in Jordan; Rami Rmeileh and Maziyar Ghiabi on Palestinians in Lebanon; Stacey Philbrick Yadav on the Houthis and Yemeni public opinion; and Mandy Turner on the repression of pro-Palestinian protest in Britain. There’s also a fascinating report from Lama Shehadeh on battles over urban space in Kufa Qara, a Palestinian town inside the Green Line. Truly an all-star issue which should be required reading for everyone following the Gaza crisis.

Next, I want to highlight the publication of the first issue of Tamazgha Studies Journal, an open access peer-reviewed journal which aims to “foreground a critical understanding of the geocultural and intellectual space of the current Maghreb through multilingual and indigeneity-informed approaches.” This exciting initiative is led by the stellar team of Brahim El Guabli (whose book I featured and reviewed earlier this week), Katarzyna Pieprzak and Anour Boum. Articles in the inaugural issues include reflections on the idea of Tamazgha studies by El Guabli, Boum, Paul Silverstein, Malika Assam, Heide Castańeda, Anouar Al Younnsi, and more. This is an exciting and provocative scholarly initiative which should be a must read for scholars of North Africa - I will be following!

After the jump, this week’s journal articles, featuring two fascinating articles in Nations and Nationalism about Israel’s 2018 nationality law, a provocative study of the potentially counterproductive effects of ‘trauma’ work on mobilizations such as Syria’s, a deeply researched study (originally presented at a POMEPS conference in Beirut, I’m thrilled to say) on Beirut’s scrap economies, and a keenly argued analysis of Turkey’s weapons procurement which shows the real impact of national identity on core issues of military power.

Eyal Chowers, “Ethics and the state: Israel's nationality law and the revision of a revolution,” Nations and Nationalism (January 2024). ABSTRACT: In 2018, 70 years after it was founded, the State of Israel accepted a new nationality law, one which reshaped the identity of the state. Supporters of this constitutional law argue that it is necessary since the Jewish-national character of the state is under threat, and since liberal-democratic principles and policies have acquired undesired dominance in public life. The nationality law, however, does much more than restore a lost or imagined collective identity: it is a significant setback to both the liberal and republican understandings of a democratic state, as well as to Jewish-Arab relations. More broadly still, the law displays the growing distance between the ethical and political spheres in Israel; this distance is expressed in the law's remarkable modifications of the three Zionist revolutions pertaining to the material (land), the linguistic and the political-communal dimensions of Jewish, national life.

Doron Eldar and Gay Young, “The ‘Nation-State Law’ and non-Jews belonging in Israel: Druze loyalty, citizenship and positionality in the Jewish state,” Nations and Nationalism (January 2024). ABSTRACT: This paper probes the relationship between nationalism and belonging. In the context of the enactment of the ‘Nation-State Law’ in Israel, it addresses a twofold question: how do members of the Druze community articulate the minority group's sense of belonging to the national community, and what do their constructions of belonging suggest about how Druze might shape and secure their belonging in the Jewish nationalist project? Our analytical approach draws on theoretical accounts of the politics of belonging and nationalist projects centred on culture and political values; civic identifications and attachments; and the racialized positioning of social groups. The analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews evoked four metaphors through which we elaborate the impact of the Nation-State Law on Druze belonging and explore the implications for Druze engagement with this Jewish nationalist project. We envision the possibility of Druze pursuing a transversal intersectional political project of belonging as non-Jews in Israel.

Zeinah Al-Azmeh and Patrick Baert, “‘Trauma work’ as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements,” Theory and Society (February 2024). ABSTRACT: This paper examines the impact of a shift in focus from political praxis to trauma work in the context of a failed democratisation movement. It investigates the various phenomena which emerge when intellectuals, under the traumatic impact of violence and atrocities, place trauma narration at the core of their interventions. Drawing on document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with twenty nine exiled Syrian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin who had participated in the revolutionary movement of 2011, the paper suggests that an inversion of the normative power structures pertaining to how intellectuals relate to their publics occurs when they adopt, under conditions of extreme violence and trauma, what we call a radically embedded positionality vis-à-vis ‘the people’. This results in the dismantling of previous figurations of the ‘militant intellectual’ along with praxis-focused notions of the ‘responsibility of intellectuals’, ultimately undermining their ideational influence upon domestic publics and weakening their political impact and critical role within a revolutionary movement.

Elizabeth Saleh, “Guns, gangs and metal: The double-edged sword of protection inside Beirut's scrap economies,” Anthropology Today (February 2024). ABSTRACT: In Beirut, the role of ‘local strong men’, known as the masoul, has significantly transformed, particularly in Lebanon's financial crisis and since the devastating Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Traditionally, these armed henchmen, affiliated with mainstream political parties, have exerted control over the scrap metal industry, from collection to transportation. However, the increasing profitability of scrap metal, notably copper and iron – long-standing leading exports – has led to new forms of ‘local strong men’, termed ‘asabet (gangs). These groups have escalated violence, breaking from what was previously considered normative behaviour. This article examines these evolving protection practices and their implications for Lebanon's sociopolitical landscape.

Lisel Hintz and David Banks, “Symbolic Amplification and Suboptimal Weapons Procurement: Explaining Turkey’s S-400 Program,” Security Studies 31, no.5. ABSTRACT: Turkey’s 2019 acquisition of Russian S-400 missile batteries is puzzling. Despite repeated threats of sanctions by the United States, North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Turkey purchased a multi-billion-dollar Russian air defense system that remains nonoperational, fails to cover Turkey’s air defense gap, and led to Turkey’s costly expulsion from the F-35 program. We argue unexpected domestic constraints created by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s symbolic diplomacy raised the political costs of backing away from the deal. Collecting data from media reports and interviews, we analyze how Turkey’s AKP wielded the S-400 as a weapons system legitimating an identity narrative of Turkey as regional counterhegemon, facilitating the cultivation of coalitions with multiple, often competing, constituencies. We demonstrate via process tracing how the inherent ambiguity of symbols allowed nationalist constituencies key to the AKP’s hold on power to amplify the S-400 as symbolic of Turkey’s sovereignty, trapping Turkish officials in a costly policy corner. In unpacking Turkey’s S-400 purchase, the article contributes to the literature on symbolic diplomacy, audience costs, weapons procurement, and deterrence failure.