Middle East & North Africa

Emily Whalen reviews Anatomies of Revolution by George Lawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The idea for a workshop on feminisms in the Middle East materialized at an MEI-hosted book launch for Nermin Allam (Rutgers University-Newark), “Women and the Egyptian Revolution,” in fall 2018. Over the subsequent dinner, Allam, Leila Ahmed (Harvard Divinity School), Tarek Masoud (MEI Faculty Director), and current and former MEI research fellows Lihi Ben Shitrit, Yuree Noh, and Hind Ahmed Zaki discussed extensively new trends in feminism and gender activism in the Middle East post-Arab Spring. Such a talk over dinner, naturally, was insufficient.

Since last October, Iraqis have staged peaceful anti-government protests throughout Baghdad and the southern provinces. These mass protest movements have drawn attention for their unifying nationalistic rhetoric, their irreverence for traditional societal and political figures, and for their strict adherence to peaceful means in the face of increasing brutality by the government’s forces and paramilitary groups.

Stephen Walt details how Europe is suddenly facing serious questions about its future role in world politics—and even in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

We’re living in the information age. But when it comes to fundamental change in society, organized industrial workers remain a powerful, bedrock force. And that’s just as true in Iran as in other modern nations.

Within a few years of the historic Arab uprisings of 2011, popular mobilization dissipated amidst instability in many Arab countries. We trace the relationship between shifting macro-political conditions and individual-level political values in the Middle East, demonstrating that a preference for democracy and political trust are not fixed cultural features of populations but rather can shift rapidly in the face of perceived insecurity. Our empirical analyses employ longitudinal data from the Arab Barometer covering 13 countries and data from the 2015 World Values Survey, which includes both Arab and non-Arab countries in order to benchmark regional developments against global patterns. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on the political effects of insecurity and oppose culturalist depictions of fixed political attitudes among Muslims in narrow perspectives on the relationship between Islam and democracy.

PRIOR TO THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP, and the current season of hand- wringing about democracy’s prospects for survival in the United States and Europe, Western social scientists tended to think of democracy as something “we” had achieved and “they”—that is, the peoples of the so-called developing world—had yet to grasp. The hypothesized reasons for this gap between “us” and “them” were many.

BEIRUT — Since President Donald Trump revealed his plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace last Tuesday, Arab states individually and collectively, in their actions and statements, have offered a dizzying array of reactions. These range from approval and mild acquiescence to soft support and absolute rejection. 

The combinations of contradictory actions and statements have been more striking than usual, due to the convoluted political positions most Arab leaders found themselves in. Three Arab ambassadors attended the Washington, D.C. unveiling event that seemed like a post-victory locker room celebration by right-wing Israelis and their fanatic American supporters. A few Arab states issued statements appreciating Trump’s efforts and urging a peace agreement to be forged through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (rather than through this plan’s narrow extremist American-Israeli lineage). And on Saturday night the Arab League summit of foreign ministers issued a collective and “complete” rejection of the plan, noting it would not lead to a just peace because “it does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

Rami Khouri's on Euronews TV discussing the Trump-Netanyahu Middle East initiative.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace plan unveiled by President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounds more like a road map for their own futures than for the Middle East.