Contemporary Middle East Research Articles

Elie Wiesel and the Biblical Archetypes of the Contemporary Middle East

AbstractThis article focuses on two newspaper advertisements written by Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, which were published shortly before his death in 2016. These controversial advertisements, appearing in the US and the UK, addressed recent tensions in the Middle East, referencing the books of 2Kings and Esther. The article explores Wiesel’s relationship to contemporary politics, traditions of biblical interpretation, and ideas of sacred temporality. I argue that these advertisements present a vivid case study of the potential difficulties posed by framing contemporary conflicts via biblical archetypes. Specifically, I suggest that they challenge us to develop an awareness of instances in which biblical reception can mythologize suffering by subsuming novel and complex events into premeditated narratives.

The Cultural Geopolitics of Ethnic Nationalism: Turkish Urbanism in Occupied Istanbul (1918–1923)

What are the roles of history and memory in geopolitics? How does urban experience influence geopolitical understandings of one's place in the world? This article brings these questions to a study of how Ottoman Turkish citizens of Istanbul came to link ethnicity with nationalism and to view their Greek Orthodox neighbors as national betrayers. I propose an explicitly cultural geopolitics: an affective, embodied critical geopolitics contextually dependent on experience, encounter, and memory in place. My sources are postwar Ottoman humor gazettes published in Istanbul, the waning capital of the Ottoman Empire, while it was occupied by Allied forces immediately after World War I. The future sovereignty of the city was unknown, and there was no coherent state structure. As normative (and also subversive) popular media, humor gazettes illustrate the reverberation of postwar geopolitics with the lived and remembered processes of urban place. Ethno-nationalist Turkish belonging in Istanbul was a form of urbanism, composed of place-based norms for behavior and a commonly understood cultural geography of the city. Satirical depictions of urban Turkish and Greek encounters during the armistice era betray a Turkish anxiety surrounding territorial and historical claims to the city and also a simultaneous questioning and hardening of the imagined geographies that demarcated Turkish and Greek identities as nationally distinct. This research illuminates the topological and relational dimensions of ethno-nationalist identity formation and the role of urban cultural processes in political belonging in the contemporary Middle East.

Tribes and states in a changing Middle East

This book is a tribute to the late Joseph Kostiner, long associated with the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, whose passion was the role of tribes and tribalism in state formation in the Middle East. Compiled in mid-2012, a little more than a year into the Arab Spring, this memorial volume suggests that tribes and states in the contemporary Middle East are best approached on a state by state basis, even though comparative analysis can provide insight into unique cases. Uzi Rabi, Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and one of the foremost scholars working on tribal identity, has assembled an impressive group of scholars to explore the past context and current conditions shaping tribal–state relations in the region. Contributors include historian Joshua Teitelbaum, anthropologist Dawn Chatty and political scientist Jill Crystal. The contributors argue that in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia, tribes and states generally have reached understandings mutually beneficial for both parties. Consequently, the tribes in these states are less likely to challenge the state as long as the rulers maintain a balance of power between the tribes and include tribal values in the national ethos. Tribe–state interdependence is most notable in Jordan, where the regime's tribal base of support has proved vital to the preservation of the political order. In Qatar, tribal identities have endured despite the country's transformation into an independent petrostate, but in the United Arab Emirates, tribalism as an organizing force in governance and social life has declined, superseded by a growing sense of national identity. In Oman, the sultan has preserved the cultural values of the tribes, but reduced their political power to neutralize their ability to harm the regime. In Saudi Arabia, cultural elements of tribal traits and traditions have been safeguarded and tribal mechanisms continue to be utilized to govern a society where kin and tribal modes of living endure.

What’s in a name? Re-conceptualizing non-state armed groups in the Middle East

AbstractIn recent decades, the role and status of non-state armed groups (NSAGs)—generally defined as armed organizations operating outside the control of the state and willing and able to use force to achieve their objectives—has attracted growing scholarly and policy interest; mirroring these groups’ seemingly more prominent role in both war-making and post-conflict transitions. This is especially the case when it comes to the contemporary Middle East and North Africa, where a combination of state fragility, conflict and instability has further enhanced the military, political and social importance of NSAGs. But is there a mismatch between the organizational evolution of some NSAGs and the conceptual framework adopted to describe and analyze them? How can recognizing these limitations help better conceptualizing and analyzing violent non-state organizations? In the Middle East, organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah operate simultaneously as sophisticated armed organizations, complex political entities and as highly developed social movement organizations involved in administering and delivering social services at the grassroots level. Elsewhere in the region, the rise of the “Islamic State” offers an entirely distinct example of a socio-political project established by an actor commonly defined as a NSAG. Despite the significant ideological, organizational and strategic differences between these organizations, all three actors fall broadly within the “non-state armed groups” category. Yet, both in their use of armed force, as well in their relationship with the state, these organizations appear as characterized by multi-layered identities and strategies that defy simple labelling. Moreover, these groups’ different roles as alternative providers of governance de facto blur the line between state and non-state actor and create an evolving dynamic that simultaneously challenges, contests and redefines concepts like statehood and sovereignty. The article analyzes the organizational evolution of these three actors and, in doing so, it problematizes and challenges the way we currently conceptualize and think about non-state actors in general and non-state armed groups more specifically. This article is published as part of a collection on analyzing security complexes in a changing Middle East.

Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach

In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's first page:In May 2007, the board of University of Southern Denmark (SDU) made a strategic decision in declaring the field of modern Middle East studies a priority research area of the Faculty of Humanities at SDU. The board underpinned this decision with the allocation of substantial additional means to the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies at SDU (hereafter “the Centre”). The research staff of the Centre was augmented by two regular professorships, one guest professorship (one-year term) and two PhD positions. In this way, the board aimed at strengthening the research component of the Centre and its international profile. The first new faculty member was guest professor Francesco Cavatorta (today teaching at Université Laval in Canada), who was employed from August 2008 to July 2009. Since then, nine scholars have served as guest professors at the Centre, representing countries as diverse as Germany, India, Ireland, Jordan, Turkey, and the United States. In January 2009, the Faculty of Humanities appointed Dietrich Jung as the first regular professor. Jung previously worked as a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). He also took over the directorship of the Centre from Associate Professor Peter Seeberg who had served in this position since (...)

The Transnational Mosque : Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East / Kishwar Rizvi

The Transnational Mosque : Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East / Kishwar Rizvi

People, sects and states: interrogating sectarianism in the contemporary Middle East

In late 2010, the self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor Mohammad Bouazzizi triggered the outbreak of the Arab Uprisings, the ramifications of which shaped the nature of regional relations o...

The transnational mosque: architecture and historical memory in the contemporary Middle East

The transnational mosque: architecture and historical memory in the contemporary Middle East

Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East. By Brian C. Rathbun. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

<i>Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East</i>. By Brian C. Rathbun. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Who Is a Rebel? Typology and Rebel Groups in the Contemporary Middle East

This article provides a typology of rebel groups in the Middle East from the perspective of political science and situates them in a broader context of rebellion around the world.

Soft Power, Religion, and Anti-Americanism in the Middle East

This study presents the first systematic analysis of the public opinion dimension of soft power competition in the contemporary Middle East. Building on the scholarship on perceptions of foreign states and Arab public opinion, it proposes a series of hypotheses about sectarian identity, religious worldviews, and anti-Americanism as determinants of attitudes toward Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in the context of regional rivalry. It then presents multivariate probit estimations utilizing Pew Global Attitudes Survey to test these hypotheses. The findings suggest that religious identity and worldviews directly affect favorability ratings of these three powers in the Arab Middle East. While Sunnis favor Saudi Arabia and Turkey over Iran, religious individuals demanding Islamic law favor the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, anti-Americanism translates into lower support for Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but greater support for Iran. Democratic attitudes have no influence over perceptions of these three powers indicating the limits of democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool.

Forced Displacement and Refugees

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.

The Domestic Democratic Peace in the Middle East

The democratic peace theory has two complementary variants regarding intrastate conflicts: the “democratic civil peace” thesis sees democratic regimes as pacifying internal tensions; the “anocratic war” thesis submits that due to nationalism, democratizing regimes breed internal violence. This paper statistically tests the two propositions in the context of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We show that a MENA democracy makes a country more prone to both the onset and incidence of civil war, even if democracy is controlled for, and that the more democratic a MENA state is, the more likely it is to experience violent intrastate strife. Interestingly, anocracies do not seem to be predisposed to civil war, either worldwide or in MENA. Looking for causality beyond correlation, we suggest that “democratizing nationalism” might be a long-term prerequisite for peace and democracy, not just an immediate hindrance. We also advise complementing current research on intrastate and interstate clashes with the study of intercommunal conflicts and the democratic features of non-state polities. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HE

Militias in internal warfare: From the colonial era to the contemporary Middle East

Although it is a tenet of political science that the modern state possesses a ‘monopoly of violence’, governments have repeatedly used militias outside the formal chain of command of their armed forces when waging counterinsurgency (COIN), and in recent conflicts the USA, UK, and other Western powers have used irregular forces when fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. War-weariness and financial austerity is likely to encourage American and allied policymakers to rely on auxiliaries as proxies, despite the fact that historical experience demonstrates that the use of militias in COIN can have counterproductive consequences, not least for state stability. This article also concludes that the tendency of some Middle Eastern states (notably Iraq and Syria) to ‘coup-proof’ their militaries renders them even more dependent on militias in the face of a sustained internal revolt, as their regular armed forces collapse under the stress of combat. In this respect, there is a direct link between ‘coup-proofing’, dependence on irregular auxiliaries in civil war, and the erosion of the state’s integrity.

Theorizing Diplomacy as Agency

Brian C. Rathbun. (2014). Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 267 pp., $29.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-8014-7990-8). Almost twenty years ago, Paul Sharp (1999, 34) made the following observation in this very journal: “… we might think that students of international relations would pay a great deal of attention to diplomacy, but they do not. The study of diplomacy remains marginal to and almost disconnected from the field.” Close to two decades later, the study of diplomacy, firmly planted within the discipline of international relations, is in much healthier shape. Sharp’s own (2009) Diplomatic Theory of International Relations , Christer Jonsson and Martin Hall’s (2005) Essence of Diplomacy , Jennifer Mitzen’s (2013) Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance , Keren Yarhi-Milo’s (2014) Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations , and Rebecca Adler-Nissen’s (2014) Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty, and European Integration are all exemplary attempts to not only refocus attention onto diplomacy as a discrete activity of international practice that deserves attention, but to theorize at a deep level how diplomats contribute to the construction of the international system. Brian C. Rathbun’s (2014) Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East not only contributes to this resurgence of interest in diplomacy, but propels the discussion forward in three important ways, including theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. Before discussing the value of the argument, … mholmes{at}wm.edu

Kurds and Their Cultural Crossroads

Kurds have come to occupy an increasingly important position in the contemporary Middle East, notably in the struggle against Islamic State (IS). This has brought about an increased presence of Kurds in global media. At the same time, the Kurdish media landscape in the Middle East and in the diaspora has developed rapidly. The timing is thus appropriate to reconsider Kurdish media and cultural production in the light of the recent political, cultural, social and technological shifts. In this editorial introduction to the special issue on Kurdish media and cultural production we reflect on this growing field of research, focusing on three questions: How do media and cultural production contribute to contemporary (discourses on) Kurdish movements, and vice versa? How can we explain the emergence of a Kurdish mediascape in the Middle East and Europe theoretically and methodologically? And, what is the relevance and potential effect of this emerging Kurdish mediascape for the existing politics of media at the national and international level? We give a brief overview of the current state of research on Kurdish media and cultural production and discuss the articles in this special issue and how they contribute to a stronger understanding of the relations between media, culture and society in the Middle East.

Diplomacy after Policymaking: Theorizing Hyper-Empowered Individuals

Diplomatic Afterlives. Edited by Andrew F Cooper. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. 206 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6199-5). The academic study of diplomacy in the discipline of International Relations (IR) has flourished in recent years (see Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann ⇓; Pouliot and Cornut ⇓ for recent volumes that include substantive reviews of the recent diplomacy renaissance). After decades of discounting diplomacy's importance in favor of structural explanations (Rathbun ⇓:1), diplomacy has (re)-emerged on the landscape of mainstream IR theorizing. One reason for this is the growing recognition that states spend so much time engaging in diplomacy, it must be for a good reason (if we assume that states take purposeful actions). More important is the growing sense that structural features beyond the control of individuals, such as power, do not account for the tremendous variation we see in political outcomes in the international system. In order to make sense of this variation, we need a theory of agency, an understanding of how individual agents can affect outcomes independent of other structural factors. Several works in the last few years have attempted to construct theories of diplomacy as theories of agency. Rathbun's (⇓) Diplomacy's Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East is an exemplar. Rathbun sets out discrete propositions about how diplomatic styles and diplomat characteristics, particularly prosocial vs. proself orientations, combine to help explain the Locarno period in Europe. Yarhi-Milo's (⇓) Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations demonstrates that policymakers often make decisions about the intentions of states not just by looking at structural factors, but instead by relying on preexisting beliefs and …

Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East. By Brian C. Rathbun. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 280p. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East. By Brian C. Rathbun. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 280p. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Diplomacy's value: creating security in 1920s Europe and the contemporary Middle East

Diplomacy's value: creating security in 1920s Europe and the contemporary Middle East

Origine, caratteri e principali correnti del pensiero palestinese di resistenza, 1967-73

The 1967 defeat thoroughly discredited Arab nationalist regimes and movements that proved incapable of liberating Palestine and achieving Arab unity. This contributed to the rise of several Palestinian guerrilla groups who took up popular armed struggle as a primary means of achieving their goals. The takeover of the Palestine Liberation Organization by Fatḥ and other armed organizations in 1969 was a watershed in the history of the Palestinian struggle and marked the emergence of an independent national liberation movement. This paper focuses on the origins, the ideological developments, and the main currents of Palestinian resistance thought in the years 1967-1973, when the fundamental documents and principles that were to constitute the basis of Palestinian resistance movement were elaborated. While doing that, it also shows what influence Palestinian resistance thought had on the shaping of contemporary Middle East.