The MENA Academy Weekly Roundup (8.21.23)

Your guide to the latest academic publications, news and events. Plus, what to expect from my blog over the coming academic year!

Photo: Mosaab El-Shamy, Cairo 13 August 2013 (@mosaaberizing)

Welcome to a new academic year! Please stop crying, gnashing your teeth, frantically reworking your syllabus or otherwise interfering with this joyous moment. I’ve been a bit quiet here during the month of August because of vacation and general exhaustion, but I’m gearing up to resume bringing you a full menu of content on a weekly basis from the MENA Academy. Here’s what to expect.

I still plan to offer my weekly book review essays, of course— I’ve spent my vacation happily burrowing into a giant pile of new books and I can’t wait to write about them (I know this is not normal. It’s too late for me.). The POMEPS podcast will be returning in September as well, and I’m exploring ways to better integrate that into the blog.

I’m also going to offer a regular weekly roundup of recent publications, news and events related to Middle East political science (it was kinda sporadic last year; it will be more regular now). If you’ve got an article, fellowship or job opportunity, new website, or anything else appropriate you’d like included, send it my way — especially if it’s based on work that was supported or incubated in some way by POMEPS, but that’s not required. Please send me notices about new books too, but I’ll probably save those for the book review essays.

I’ll also be writing more frequent pieces about current events and topical issues (and you’ll learn about them here), but I’m going to have to wait a few more weeks before I can give you the exciting details about where to find those and how that’s going to work. Trust me, you’re going to like it.

One last thing: I’ll be at the APSA annual meeting for Friday only in case you want to meet up to talk about your book project or anything else.

Briefly noted: New publications and opportunities of note

• Siyasat Arabiya #60: Curious about political science published in Arabic, and how it relates to the English-language research community? The new issue of the Arab Center (Doha)’s Siyasat Arabiya features part one of a two part symposium based on a systematic review of Arabic-language publishing. I’m looking forward to digging into the findings in detail and writing about them, but you can check it out for yourself here!

• Call for Proposals for the 2023 APSA MENA Workshops, a two part research development workshop in collaboration with the American University of Cairo. Applications due September 17.

• POMEPS opportuniteis: TRE Grants, to support research in the MENA region during the 2024 calendar year in amounts up to $3000, proposals due October 17; Virtual Research Workshop, for articles intended for peer-reviewed journal publications, proposals due September 8.

Featured Articles: a roundup of articles I’ve collected over the late summer. Not every week will be quite this.. extensive.

Liina Mustonen, “On the Eve of the Authoritarian Turn: Mourning the Lives of the ‘Terrorists’,” Journal of Genocide Research (Early View, 12 August 2023). Abstract: On 14 August 2013, Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of supporters and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood in two squares of Egypt's capital Cairo: Rab‘a al-‘Adawiyya and al-Nahda. Those killed had protested against the military coup that ousted President Mohamed Morsi. The state's propaganda machine and the media connected to Egypt's influential business people designated those killed as terrorists. Human rights organizations paint a grim picture of the decade of authoritarian rule. In the regime's rhetoric, the fight against terrorism justifies the continued crackdown on Egyptian civil society movements and opposition. Again this year, the anniversary of the Rab‘a al-‘Adawiyya and al-Nahda massacres is likely to receive little coverage in the country's mainstream media. While the voices of those opposing the military coup in 2013 in Egypt are long silenced, on the massacre's tenth anniversary, it is time to recall an alternative to the narrative of the Egyptian state. Participants of a women's Quran reading group in one of Cairo’s impoverished neighborhoods questioned the military coup in 2013 and anticipated what was to come. ( ** POMEPS Junior Scholar Book Workshop **)

Jose Ciro Martinez and Omar Sirri, Bureaucraft: Statemakers in Amman and Baghdad, Cultural Anthropology (2023) Martinez and Sirri put their own distinctive deep ethnographic research — Martinez on bakeries in Amman, Jordan, and Sirri on checkpoints in Baghdad, Iraq — to offer a fascinating new take on the manifestation of the “state effect” through what they call “bureaucratic assemblages.” In their keenly observed telling, state agents, whether bakers or soldiers manning the checkpoints, do not simply enact bureaucratic scripts or enforce written rules. They react and improvise in response to new and unexpected situations, producing the face of the state for the citizens with whom they interact. As they put it in the abstract I only discovered too late, “the embodied dexterities deployed by bakers and soldiers as they carry out their jobs at bakeries and checkpoints dotted across the Jordanian and Iraqi capitals. Drawing on ethnographic work, we develop the concept of bureaucraft to analyse the variegated modes of labour without which citizens would lack for some of the most basic of public goods.” (**POMEPS TRE Grant Recipients**)

Ameni Mehrez, “When Right is Left: Values and Voting Behavior in Tunisia,” Political Behavior (Open Access, 29 June 2023). Abstract: According to theories on ideological differences, individuals who endorse the values of freedom, justice, and equality are expected to be left-wing oriented, whereas individuals who endorse authoritarian values are expected to be right-wing oriented. I hypothesize that such associations do not hold in the Arab world, where in the context of past state formation trajectories, leftists and secularists endorsed an authoritarian-nationalist discourse to build post-colonial states, while Islamists endorsed a freedom-and-justice discourse as a reaction to state oppression. Using original representative face-to-face survey data collected right after the 2019 Tunisian elections, I test this hypothesis by examining which values determine citizens’ voting behavior in both parliamentary and presidential elections. Results show that people who endorse liberty-and-justice values are more likely to vote for Islamist right-wing parties, whereas those who endorse authoritarian-nationalist values are more likely to vote for leftist parties. These results have important implications for the study of voting behavior in the Arab world and in comparative politics.

Douglas Jones, “Challenging the rules of the game: clientelism and dissent in the Middle East,” Democratization (First View, 2 August 2023). Abstract: Since 2010, waves of protest have ebbed and now largely faded across the Arab states of the Middle East, and authoritarian politics there appear to be stronger than ever. Has dissent disappeared, or merely become harder to notice? I argue in this article that clientelism serves as an important locus of latent dissent in the Middle East, one that calls into question the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, though it often happens away from public view. Employing data from four waves of the Arab Barometer, however, I show that the more citizens perceive clientelism to be prevalent in society, the less likely they are to willingly obey their government when they disagree with it. This finding is most pronounced among those most on the fence about obeying the government in the first place, and during periods in which overt dissent is least apparent. Clientelism beliefs also increase support for democratic alternatives in the most recent data. In addition, while clientelism should increase voting and election-related mobilization, I find inconsistent results across time. This article complicates our current understanding of the role clientelism plays in authoritarian states, and it sheds new light on the “client side” of the patron-client relationship. ( ** POMEPS Virtual Research Workshop **)

Yuree Noh, Sharan Grewal, and M. Tahir Kilavuz, “Regime Support and Gender Quotas in Autocracies,” American Political Science Review (First View, 10 July 2023). Abstract: Gender quotas are increasingly being adopted by autocrats in part to legitimize their rule. Yet, even in autocracies, these quotas increase women’s political representation. It thus stands to reason that public support for gender quotas in autocracies might be shaped by this trade-off between advancing women’s rights and granting the regime legitimacy. All else equal, regime opponents should be less supportive of gender quotas in autocracies, wary of legitimizing the regime. We uncover evidence of this proposition in an analysis of region-wide Arab Barometer surveys and a survey experiment in Algeria. We also find that evaluations of this trade-off are conditioned by other demographics, with women, gender egalitarians, and Islamists remaining more consistent in their support for/opposition to gender quotas regardless of regime gains. Overall, our findings suggest that gender quotas in autocracies are viewed through a political lens, creating a potential backlash toward women’s empowerment.

Ehsan Kafshi, “The Politics of Street Names: Reconstructing Iran’s collective identity,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (First View, Open Access, 3 August 2023). With the radical political change in 1979, Iran's revolutionary state assumed the responsibility of re-rewriting the past history to forge a new sense of belonging, a particularly collective religious (Shia) identity. It launched a complex process of forgetting and remembering to first eliminate the national (Persian), non-religious memories and heritage, associated and celebrated by the previous regime and then establish a sense of continuity with the country's Shia past; a feeling markedly engendered with a distinguishing symbolic reservoir of Shia traditions and memories, presented in history books, literature, the media, and everyday culture.This paper seeks to examine the role of street names in this process of reconstructing a new religious (Shia) collective memory and identity with particular reference to Tehran, Iran, during the 1979-2019 period. It seeks to analyze changes in the city's street names and analyze the widespread renaming of streets and public spaces in the city as one means of both ‘de-commemorating’ the pre-revolutionary regime and marking the Shia legacy and memories as the signifiers of a widespread political maneuver to articulate a new version of the past and narrative of identity since the 1979 revolution. (** POMEPS Virtual Research Workshop and Thematic Workshop participant **)

Rory McCarthy, “Islamism, party change, and strategic conciliation: Evidence from Tunisia,” Party Politics (Online First, 23 July 2023, Open Access). Abstract: What happens to an Islamist party after moderating its behaviour and ideology? Existing work on Islamist parties has elaborated the varied causes of moderation. Yet, the mixed findings do not capture the full range of Islamist dynamics. This article draws on a multiyear, interview-based study of the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda to interrogate the process of intraparty change after moderation. Islamist parties face a two-level problem with external and internal trade-offs. I argue that the intraparty characteristics that enable moderation may also contribute to undermining a party’s institutional structure and identity as it responds to an uncertain political context. These findings bring processual evidence from Islamist parties into broader explanations of party change and highlight the ongoing effects of moderation, not just its causes. ( ** POMEPS TRE Grant Recipient ** )

That’s it for this week’s MENA Academy roundup. Up next: the return of the review essay!