Number of results to display per page
Search Results
232. The Human Rights Movement and Contentious Politics in Egypt (2004-2014)
- Author:
- Amr Adly
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- The economic and social rights movement has struck some success in working with contentious movements to challenge public policies and institutions in Egypt. However, no organic relationship developed between the two. The contentious movement did not strategically adopt an economic and social rights framing that would have enabled it to get beyond its local, largely apolitical and un-institutionalized characteristics in favour of a nationwide platform.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
233. Rethinking Orientalism
- Author:
- Nadje al-Ali
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Rutgers University School of Law
- Abstract:
- The lecture will address the relevance of Edward Said’s Orientalism for the contemporary study of women and gender in the Middle East. What are the main challenges of researching and talking about gender in the Middle East? What are the continuities in our engagement with Orientalism and where do we find ruptures and limitations? Based on empirical research as well as activism in relation to Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon, this lecture will discuss the centrality of a gendered analysis in understanding recent developments in the region. It will pay particular attention to the centrality of body politics in challenging authoritarianism.
- Topic:
- Politics, Authoritarianism, Women, Research, Orientalism, Activism, and Gender
- Political Geography:
- Iraq, Turkey, Middle East, Lebanon, and Egypt
234. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXVI, NO. 2
- Author:
- Shehab Ismail, Reem Bailony, Neha Vora, Ahmed Kanna, Graham Auman Pitts, Judith Naeff, Maha Nassar, Benoit Challand, Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, David Gutman, Alexa Firat, Matthew L. Keegan, Matthew S. Hopper, Johan Mathew, and Thomas F. McDow
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Arab Studies Journal
- Institution:
- Arab Studies Institute
- Abstract:
- We are proud to feature a collection of pieces that innovate new methodological approaches, confront the relationship between knowledge and power, and speak to the urgent concerns of the present, infrastructure, ecology, migration, and war. In “Epicures and Experts: The Drinking Water Controversy in British Colonial Cairo,” Shehab Ismail explores taste, class, and the environment. When in 1905 the Cairo Water Company altered its source of intake to deep wells instead of the Nile, it pitted experts, officials, and the urban poor in a battle over knowledge, medical traditions, and water practices. In tracing the five year struggle in which the palate became a battleground, Ismail reveals how taste, as a mode of embodied knowledge became a site of confrontation between heterogenous epistemic persuasions. In “From Mandate Borders to the Diaspora: Rashaya’s Transnational Suffering and the Making of Lebanon in 1925,” Reem Bailony traces debates on the social, political, and economic constructions of Lebanon and Syria, both in the borders of the French Mandate and well outside of it. By placing mahjar studies and Middle East studies in close conversation, Bailony both calls for and provides a model for a methodology that transgresses the territorial confines of the nation-state. In doing so, she reveals the crucial role of the mahjar in consolidating Lebanon as nationally distinct from Syria and in need of different sectarian arrangements. Neha Vora and Ahmed Kanna contribute reflections on two decades of ethnographic experiences researching Dubai and other cities in the Arabian Penninsula. “De-exceptionalizing the Field: Anthropological Reflections on Migration, Labor, and Identity in Dubai,” explores and critiques scholarly identity and authority in a call to develop understandings of Gulf cities that address migration, diaspora, place, and belonging. Vora and Kanna thus put the individual experiences of politics, geography, racialization, and minoritization into conversation with the knowledge that is produced on these historical forces. Graham Pitts reveals how the “human ecology” of Lebanon evolved according to the logic of an expanding and retracting global capitalism in “The Ecology of Migration: Remittances in World War I Mount Lebanon.” In detailing the material and environmental history of migration as well as highlighting World War I, the famine, and remittances, Pitts traces a broader trajectory of Lebanon’s history. In “Writing Shame in Asad’s Syria,” Judith Naef analyzes how the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa built feelings of shame into the literary structure of his novel No Knives in the Kitchens of this City. She traces the multiple forms of shame and how, like rot, its pervasive spread unravels relations. Shame, she suggests, is at once contagious and repulsive, and is one site to both refect on and understand the unraveling of Syrian social landscapes under the Asads’ authoritarianism. We ofer as always a robust set of reviews and review essays that feature the latest contributions to the study of the Middle East.
- Topic:
- Migration, War, History, Labor Issues, Infrastructure, Capitalism, Colonialism, Anthropology, and Ecology
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, Palestine, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Dubai
235. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXVI, No. 1
- Author:
- Hussam R. Ahmed, Gil Z. Hochberg, Susanna Ferguson, Éric Verdeil, Louis Yako, Hend F. Alawadhi, Susanna Ferguson, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Hilal Alkan, Marwan D. Hanania, Simon Davis, Chris Rominger, and Corinna Mullin
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Arab Studies Journal
- Institution:
- Arab Studies Institute
- Abstract:
- We are proud to feature a diverse array of disciplines and approaches in this issue. In “Te Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952” Hussam R. Ahmed traces the bureaucratic and institutional force of one of the most infuential intellectuals of the twentieth century. He reveals new ways to think about the ties between intellectual work, knowledge production, pedagogy, and the Egyptian state. In “‘Jerusalem, We Have a Problem’: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination,” Gil Hochberg ofers a reading of both the colonial legacies of the sci-f genre and the potential for its radical upending. Hochberg ponders the question of Palestine in a futuristic post-factual and post-national time of becoming. In “‘A Fever for an Education’: Pedagogical Tought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914,” Susanna Ferguson explores education’s appeal and promise of stability and reform in the nineteenth century Arab world. In “Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State,” Éric Verdeil approaches public infrastructure as a site of political struggle. Verdeil challenges the conventional readings that assert the power of neoliberalism and sectarianism to marginalize state institutions, showing instead how infrastructural policy instruments accentuate Lebanese society’s gaps and inequalities. Finally, in “If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Tought,” Louis Yako contributes an engaged read of exile, the role of the intellectual, and the possibilities of revolution. Tis issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews. With this issue, we bid farewell to a long-time pillar of Arab Studies Journal and its book review team. Allison Brown, an inimitable editor and thinker, will be departing afer a decade of teaching and leading our team with the intellectual depth and editorial precision that have made the journal what it is today. While she may not grace our pages, she will always be part of the ASJ family.
- Topic:
- Education, History, Infrastructure, Reform, Intellectual History, Colonialism, and Literature
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, North Africa, Lebanon, and Egypt
236. What Egypt’s El-Sisi and the EU have in common when it comes to women’s rights
- Author:
- Loes Debuysere
- Publication Date:
- 10-2018
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
- Abstract:
- A young Egyptian woman by the name of Amal Fathy was given a fine and a two-year prison sentence on 29 September 2018. Her crime? Uploading a video on Facebook in May in which she shared her experiences of sexual harassment in Egypt and criticised the Egyptian government for failing to deliver to its citizens. Fathy’s sentence signalled a first controversial human rights violation on the part of the Egyptian government since the EU announced in-depth cooperation on migration with Egypt during the Salzburg summit. This sentence also takes place against the backdrop of continued support by both El-Sisi and the EU for the protection and promotion of women’s rights. Fathy’s case flies in the face of EU and Egyptian government rhetoric about women’s rights and raises questions about the sincerity of both actors’ agendas on the rights of women.
- Topic:
- Government, Human Rights, Authoritarianism, European Union, Women, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
- Political Geography:
- North Africa and Egypt
237. Egypt after the presidential election
- Author:
- James Moran
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
- Abstract:
- As you leave central Cairo heading west on the Giza highway, there is a billboard, strategically placed for all to see with a picture of a rather stern-looking President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi below the slogan, “Fighting terrorism is a human right”. It sums up the authorities’ nervy reaction to anyone, especially foreigners – the slogan is in English – who criticise the current political climate for being overly oppressive and counterproductive. As he begins his second term, Sisi can claim some success in restoring security in the country, at least outside of the long-running conflict in Northern Sinai and Egypt’s ‘wild west’ which is affected sporadically by the conflict across the border in Libya. Terrorist attacks in the Nile Valley and Delta, home to the vast majority of Egypt’s nearly 100 million people, have been curbed significantly over the past two years, and the cities certainly feel safer. Most Egyptians are grateful for those improvements, and Sisi’s popularity, while down from the heights of a few years ago, remains strong. That said, many Egyptians may no longer be ready to give him the sort of unqualified support he has enjoyed in the past: the election result gave some indication of this ambivalence, with a lower turnout (just over 40%) than in 2014 and a much higher number of spoiled ballots. And this in a situation in which there was no credible competition. Indeed, the authorities’ overzealous efforts to block candidates who might have lent greater legitimacy to the vote, as well as the threat of fines for those who did not vote appear to have backfired. Heads may yet roll for these errors in judgement.
- Topic:
- Economics, European Union, Domestic Politics, Presidential Elections, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
- Political Geography:
- North Africa and Egypt
238. Social Policy in the Middle East and North Africa
- Author:
- Melani Cammett, Kristin Fabbe, Marc Lynch, Allison Spencer Hartnett, Ferdinand Eibl, Anna Getmansky, Tolga Sınmazdemir, Thomas Zeitzoff, Melp Arslanalp, Rania AbdelNaeem Mahmoud, Sean Yom, Wael Al-Khatib, Alexandra Blackman, Dina Bishara, Markus Loewe, Lars Westemeier, Asya El-Meehy, Marc C. Thompson, and Caroline Abadeer
- Publication Date:
- 10-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- This spring, major protests swept through Jordan over economic grievances and subsidy reforms. In July, protestors took to the streets in the south of Iraq, demanding that the government address persistent unemployment, underdevelopment, and corruption. Meanwhile, earlier in 2018, Tunisians launched a wave of protests to oppose tax hikes on basic goods and increased cost of living. Such highly politicized responses to social policy concerns are the norm rather than the exception across the Middle East and North Africa. Social policy is where most citizens actually encounter the state and where policy most impacts peoples’ lives. As such, social policy and, more generally, welfare regimes, deserve a more central place in political science research on the region, as they have in the broader discipline. On April 20, 2018, POMEPS and the Harvard Middle East Initiative, led by Tarek Masoud, convened a workshop with a dozen scholars from around the world to discuss theoretical and policy issues related to social policy in the Middle East. The diverse, multidisciplinary group of scholars at the workshop addressed these questions from multiple perspectives. By probing the conditions under which reform occurs or may occur, the essays in POMEPS Studies 31, Social Policy in the Middle East and North Africa emphasize both possibilities for and persistent obstacles to change and underscore the deeply political nature of social policy reform.
- Topic:
- Development, Education, Energy Policy, Politics, Culture, Prisons/Penal Systems, Reform, Employment, Youth, Social Policy, Political Parties, Social Contract, and Housing
- Political Geography:
- Iran, Turkey, Middle East, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia
239. Views of Non-Formal Education in Egypt
- Publication Date:
- 04-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Arab Barometer
- Abstract:
- Egyptians are deeply concerned about the state of education in their country. The vast majority are dissatisfied with the current education system as well as government efforts to improve it. Perhaps as a result, most are worried that there is no possibility to provide their children with a good education. This combination means that youth non-formal education (NFE) programs hold a unique opportunity to yield significant gains in the academic achievement of students in Egypt in the near-term. However, if such programs are to address both the perceived weaknesses of the Egyptian education system and the concerns of the population, issues like cost, which limit participation, must be seriously considered. Across all demographics, cost is overwhelmingly cited as the biggest barrier to participation. The prevalence of programs organized by private institutions only exacerbates this challenge. In addition, programs must account for demographic differences. At present, the majority of youth who participate in NFE programs come from families with higher incomes, higher education levels and who live in urban areas. Expanding opportunities for accessing youth NFE programs requires special focus on targeting Egyptians who reside in rural areas, who have incomes below the median, and whose tend to have lower levels of education. Non-formal education programs provide unique potential for bridging the gap between the existing education system and what increasing educational opportunities for the country’s youth. However, careful consideration must be given to the types of programs most likely to be successful in the Egyptian context. Although youth NFE programs tend to be viewed positively across the country, a substantial portion of Egyptians are either unaware of such programs or do not look upon them favorably. Moreover, programs should target job-related skills as Egyptians consider these the most useful. NFE programs should be promoted to potential participants with this consideration in mind.
- Topic:
- Demographics, Education, Public Opinion, Higher Education, Academia, and Students
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, North Africa, and Egypt
240. June / July 2017 Issue
- Author:
- Hassan Hassan, Brian Dodwell, Don Rassler, Fernando Reinares, Carola Garcia-Calvo, Alvaro Vicente, Michael Horton, and Chris Zambelis
- Publication Date:
- 07-2017
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- CTC Sentinel
- Institution:
- The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
- Abstract:
- Two recent developments suggest the Islamic State’s caliphate pretensions are being consigned to history. The first is the group’s destruction of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, where three years ago Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared his caliphate to the world. The second is the fact that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab militia, has now entered the city limits of Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria. In our cover article, Hassan Hassan outlines the challenges ahead in liberating and holding Raqqa. While removing the Islamic State from the city could take anywhere from weeks to months, he argues the harder task will be for the force, whose backbone is made up of Kurdish fighters, to prevent the Islamic State from exploiting ethnic tensions to destabilize the city after it is liberated. But he argues there is a window of opportunity for the SDF to bring sustainable security to Raqqa and surrounding areas because of the willingness of local tribes to work with liberating forces and warming relations between the SDF and Syrian Sunni rebel groups, who increasingly view the U.S.-backed force as a check on the Assad regime’s ability to regain control of northeastern Syria. While the Islamic State is shrinking, Lieutenant General Michael K. Nagata, director of the Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning at the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, in a wide-ranging interview on evolving terror threats, draws attention to the group’s organizational resilience in the face of withering pressure from the coalition fighting it. The Islamic State’s attack on Tehran on June 7 was a case in point. At a time of rising sectarian tension across the Middle East, Chris Zambelis argues the Islamic State carried out the attack in part to bolster its recruitment and fundraising efforts—and one-up al Qa`ida—as it pivots from territory control to global terrorism. Michael Horton examines the enduring threat posed by the Islamic State’s local affiliate in the Sinai, arguing counterproductive tactics by the Egyptian government risk provoking a broader insurgency. In a study based on comprehensive data on those arrested in Spain for terrorism crimes maintained by the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid that has wide implications for the understanding of radicalization processes across Western countries, Fernando Reinares, Carola García-Calvo, and Álvaro Vicente find that jihadi radicalization in Spain has been driven by two key factors of “differential association,” namely contact with radicalizing agents and pre-existing social ties with other radicalized individuals.
- Topic:
- Terrorism, Insurgency, Counter-terrorism, Radicalization, Islamic State, and Jihad
- Political Geography:
- Iran, Middle East, Spain, Egypt, and Raqqa