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112. nternational Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East
- Author:
- Pinar Bilgin, Sarah Bush, F. Gregory III Gausse, Zeynep N. Kaya, and Matteo Legrenzi
- Publication Date:
- 09-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- The story of the Arab uprisings of 2010-11 has typically been told as a series of loosely related national stories, happening simultaneously but whose successes and failures were essentially determined by internal factors. Over the last few years, political scientists have made great progress evaluating the success or failure of each country’s uprising in terms of country-specific qualities such as types of domestic institutions, the nature of opposition movements, the wise or poor decisions made by leaders and access to oil revenues. The comparative politics literature on the uprisings has demonstrated real theoretical progress, sophisticated empirical analysis and useful—if too often ignored—policy advice. This comparative politics approach to the uprisings has always been problematic, though. The Arab uprisings began in transnational diffusion and ended in transnational repression and regional proxy wars. It is remarkably difficult to accurately explain the course of events in Egypt, Yemen or Libya without reference to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar or Iran. However, with but a few notable exceptions, the academic literature on the uprisings has been dominated by comparative analysis and country case studies, with international factors included as one among several variables, if at all. This seems odd. Why has there not been an efflorescence of international relations scholarship comparable to the impressive outpouring of comparative politics scholarship on the Arab uprisings? And if there were, what would it look like? To begin rectifying this gap, the Project on Middle East Political Science teamed up with Danish scholar Morten Valbjørn of Aarhus University to bring together nearly two-dozen American, European and Arab international relations scholars in May. The result of the workshop was an astonishingly rich set of essays from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, which are now available for free download here as a special issue in the POMEPS Studies series.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Security, Arab Spring, and Political Science
- Political Geography:
- Middle East and North Africa
113. Islam and International Order
- Author:
- Marc Lynch, Barak Mendelsohn, Reyko Huang, Lawrence Rubin, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
- Publication Date:
- 07-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- Islam has rarely been far from the center of the world’s political and security agenda in the decade and a half since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack against the United States. The range of issues to which Islam has been deemed central is staggering, from transnational terrorism and counterinsurgency in Iraq to the possibility of democracy in the Middle East. These long-running debates have been galvanized over the last few years by the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, shocking acts of terrorism from Paris to Tunisia, and the failure of the democratic experiment with Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. In April 2015 the Project on Middle East Political Science and the Transatlantic Academy hosted a workshop for a sustained discussion of emerging questions on Islam and international order. The two-day workshop brought together a broad, interdisciplinary group of scholars, including area specialists and generalists, from the fields of political science, religious studies and history. The workshop, part of the POMEPS Islam in a Changing Middle East initiative, built on the Transatlantic Academy’s 2015 theme of religion and foreign policy. Peter Katzenstein of Cornell University, in his keynote address, put the question of Islam squarely within the racial and civilizational politics of a declining American imperium. This historical and global perspective provoked a wide-ranging discussion. Islam has played many roles in many different regional and global political orders, as Cemil Aydin, Bruce Lawrence and Jonathan Brown evocatively explained. And, as Amitav Acharya forcefully argued, Islam has routinely frustrated the expectations of popular grand theories of world order. The workshop ranged widely over the question of how to think about Islam within global, regional and domestic political arenas, from a diverse range of empirical cases and theoretical literatures. Can Islam really be understood as an actor, with interests and a coherent identity? Is there something unique about Islam that prevents it from being treated theoretically like other cultural traditions such as nationalism, ethnicity or ideology? Should Islam be seen as a causal variable or as a context through which actors pursue their interests and fight their political battles? What are we doing, conceptually and politically, when we describe political thought as “Islamic political thought,” movements as “Islamic movements,” or democracy as “Islamic democracy”? The essays prepared for this workshop are available here as POMEPS Studies 15. Several key themes ran through the discussions. First, several of the memos specifically focus on the emergence of the Islamic State. Marc Lynch surveys the central analytical arguments that have been deployed to explain the Islamic State Caliphate’s development, noting the very different policy responses each might elicit. Barak Mendelsohn and Reyko Huang evaluate the Islamic State in the history of jihadist groups and insurgencies, and Lawrence Rubin argues that ideational balancing will prevent the Islamic State from becoming a normal state.
- Topic:
- Islam, Religion, Islamic State, Political Science, and International Order
- Political Geography:
- Middle East
114. Rethinking Nation and Nationalism
- Author:
- Serhun Al, Senem Aslan, Lisa Blaydes, Laurie Brand, and Kristin Fabbe
- Publication Date:
- 06-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- You couldn’t swing a dead imperialist last summer without hitting an essay about the unraveling of the Sykes-Picot system in the Middle East. The bloody disintegration of Iraq and Syria seemed to have finally ripped apart the borders created by the British and French governments in the aftermath of World War I (even if the borders in question were actually forged at San Remo). It wasn’t just the rise of the so-called Islamic State spanning and erasing the Syrian-Iraqi border. The unprecedented, synchronized popular mobilization across borders during the early Arab uprisings of 2011 gave potent form to the ideals of transnational Arab political community supplanting the limits of nation-states. As the uprisings turned darker and most of the democratic transitions failed, new challengers to nation-states in the Middle East rose to the forefront: the Islamic State; the growing de facto independence of Kurds across Iraq and Syria, with ramifications extending into Turkey and Iran; the rise of sub-regional identities carried by heavily armed militias in failing states such as Yemen and Libya; unprecedented forced displacement moving millions of people within and across borders; and raging sectarianism dividing Sunnis and Shiites. These developments have not had a singular effect on national identities, however. While some states have collapsed, creating space for new subnational identities to challenge national cohesion, most have retrenched into a fiercer form of authoritarianism. Egypt’s military coup, for instance, has been sustained by the heavy-handed promotion of extreme nationalism. Many states in the Gulf have drawn upon sectarianism to consolidate support for their regimes in ways that could have an enduring impact on popular conceptions of national identity. Battles over the proper role of Islam in public life have reshaped political discourse from Egypt and Turkey (see Senem Aslan and Kristin Fabbe in this collection) and Tunisia (Elizabeth Young). Kurds imagine new political possibilities in very different contexts, as Nicole Watts demonstrates from Halabja and Serhun Al demonstrates through the historical experience of Turkey and Iraq.
- Topic:
- Nationalism, Sectarianism, Displacement, Colonialism, and Political Science
- Political Geography:
- Iraq, Turkey, Middle East, Syria, and Jordan
115. Iran and the Nuclear Deal
- Author:
- Shervin Malekzadeh, Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Kevan Harris, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, and Farzan Sabet
- Publication Date:
- 04-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- The April 2 announcement in Lausanne of a framework for an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program has raised profound hopes and fears for the future of the Middle East. There are few developments with greater potential for fundamentally altering the political dynamics of the region – a prospect that fills skeptics with as much dread as it fuels optimism among supporters. To explore the many ramifications of the potential deal, the Project on Middle East Political Science convened a virtual symposium for the Monkey Cage. These essays have now been collected into an edition of the POMEPS Studies series, available for free download. The American public debate about the deal over the last month has primarily focused upon U.S. policy options and the details of the proposed agreement. The essays in this collection delve into such issues in depth: Michael Brown and Chantal de Jonge Oudraat explain why no better deal is on the table; Joshua Rovner explains why it matters that U.S. intelligence got Iran’s nuclear program right; Nick Miller and Or Rabinowitz show how the deal is in line with traditional U.S. nonproliferation policy; Steven Kull and Shibley Telhami investigate American public opinion toward a deal; Thomas Doyle explores the symbolic dimensions of the negotiations; and Austin Long argues that the deal limits Iranian options and will test Iran’s intentions in ways that even hawks should appreciate. Iran’s domestic politics have generally received less attention. The essays collected here offer an exceptionally nuanced profile of the issues and actors in play in the Iranian political system. The sheer extent and nature of the domestic debate over the deal is notable in its own right, as Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar explains in detail. Iranian debates have not broken down along traditional lines of moderates and hard-liners, as Shervin Malakzadeh carefully observes, but rather reflect a more fluid and fragmented factional array. Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Ali Honari trace the willingness of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to negotiate to the legacies of the grass-roots movements that followed the contentious 2009 presidential election. As Farzan Sabet observes, Iran’s conservatives are divided internally and struggling to find the right tone amidst the new realities. Iran’s parliament, facing competitive elections, carefully tracks with the trends in public opinion. Iran’s nuclear scientists themselves represent a potentially important constituency, especially if the deal is ultimately operationalized. Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seeks to hedge bets and keep a delicate balance among the factions, with an eye towards sanctions relief – which itself, as Kevan Harris argues, would intersect in complex ways with the Iranian political economy that sanctions have molded.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Nuclear Weapons, Political Science, and JCPOA
- Political Geography:
- Iran, Middle East, North America, and United States of America
116. Islamism in the IS Age
- Author:
- Jillian Schwedler, Peter Mandayille, Ahmed Khanani, Quinn Mecham, and Aaron Y. Zelin
- Publication Date:
- 03-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- The “IS-ification of Islamist politics,” in Khalil al-Anani’s felicitous phrase, has reshaped the ideological and strategic incentives for Islamist groups and their adversaries. It has also posed a new challenge to the categories, concepts and expectations of the academics who study them. In January, the Project on Middle East Political Science brought together more than a dozen leading scholars of Islamist movements to discuss the Islamic State and its effects on the broader terrain of Islamist politics. Some of the papers prepared for that workshop have been published on The Monkey Cage already and all are now collected into a new edition in the POMEPS Studies series “Islamism in the IS Age,” available for free download here. The challenge posed by the Islamic State can be broken down into a number of discrete areas. First, there is the effort to understand the nature of the group itself: its ideology, its organization and its likely future prospects. Second, there are questions about its relationship and impacts upon other groups, from the very similar (al-Qaeda) to the essentially different (the Muslim Brotherhood). Third, there are important analytical questions about the relative significance of ideology, institutions and strategic competition. It is useful to be precise about which of the arguments that consume the public sphere, such as how “Islamic” the organization is, really matter. The same is true of whether the analytical categories such as the “moderate/radical” divide or the distinction between Salafi-jihadists and mainstream Islamists still offer useful leverage. While its novelty and long-term significance may well be overstated, the Islamic State has indisputably reshaped the region’s strategic and intellectual agenda. Its rapid capture of territory through large swathes of Iraq and Syria and declaration of a new caliphate provoked a military response from the United States and have become the principle focus of a broad international coalition. It poses an intriguing ideational challenge to the norms of state sovereignty that underlie international society. Its penchant for broadcasting barbaric spectacles such as decapitations and burning alive of its hostages galvanized the attention of a horrified world. The Islamic State has built a seemingly robust proto-state in the territories it controls, and has seemingly established affiliates, with varying degrees of success, in areas such as Egypt’s Sinai and Libya. Its ability to attract foreign fighters and seeming appeal to certain radical trends has provoked a new round of alarm over domestic radicalization and terrorist threats. All of those effects are exacerbated by the frenzied media coverage of these developments in both the West and the Arab world.
- Topic:
- Sovereignty, Violent Extremism, Islamic State, Political Science, and Islamism
- Political Geography:
- Middle East
117. The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State
- Author:
- Eva Bellin, Raymond Hinnebusch, Steven Heydemann, Ellis Goldberg, and Pete W. Moore
- Publication Date:
- 02-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- It is sometimes hard to remember that the Arab uprisings of 2010-11 promised the possibility of meaningful political change. The unprecedented outburst of popular mobilization overthrew some regimes and unsettled most of the others. Those hopes have long since come crashing down. Egypt’s transition ended in a military coup, bloody repression, and a neo-authoritarianism legitimated through xenophobic populism. Tunisia’s survived, barely. Libya, Yemen, and Syria have suffered near-complete political collapse, polarization, and civil war. Almost every regime has become more intolerant and more repressive. Violent, extremist Islamist movements such as the Islamic State group have surged in this chaotic atmosphere. How should we understand the authoritarian resurgence in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings? In October 2014, Toby Dodge and I jointly convened a POMEPS-London School of Economics workshop to dig more deeply into the causes, mechanisms, and drivers of what he called “The Arab Thermidor.” More than a dozen scholars looked deeply at specific sectors such as the military, police and intelligence services, different countries, and the broader regional environment. Some of the papers produced for that workshop have been published on the Monkey Cage, and all of them have today been released as POMEPS Studies 11 The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, available as a free downloadable PDF. The papers in this collection offer a sharp, comprehensive, and acute look at the resurgence and persistence of the Arab authoritarian state.
- Topic:
- Security, Authoritarianism, Arab Spring, and Political Science
- Political Geography:
- Middle East and North Africa
118. Amérique latine -- L’année politique 2014
- Author:
- Olivier Dabène, Gaspard Estrada, Guillaume Fleury, Andrés Gómez, Erica Guevara, Damien Larrouqué, Frédéric Louault, Antoine Maillet, Frédéric Massé, Kevin Parthenay, David Recondo, Eduardo Rios, and Sebastián Urioste
- Publication Date:
- 12-2014
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
- Abstract:
- Amérique latine - L’Année politique is a publication by CERI-Sciences Po’s Political Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean (OPALC). The study extends the work presented on the Observatory’s website (www.sciencespo.fr/opalc) by offering tools for understanding a continent that is in the grip of deep transformations.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution, International Trade and Finance, Treaties and Agreements, History, Elections, Sports, Political Science, Regional Integration, and Memory
- Political Geography:
- Colombia, South America, Uruguay, Latin America, Central America, Venezuela, North America, Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia
119. A Decade of AKP Power in Turkey: Towards a Reconfiguration of Modes of Government? (Une décennie de pouvoir AKP en Turquie : vers une reconfiguration des modes de gouvernement ?)
- Author:
- Elise Massicard
- Publication Date:
- 07-2014
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
- Abstract:
- The Justice and Development Party (JDP) has been in power in Turkey since 2002, consolidating its electoral support among an array of social groups ranging from broad appeal among the popular classes to business leaders and a growing middle class. The success of the JDP is a consequence of the manner in which the party inserted itself into certain economic and social sectors. While the party has internalized the principles of reducing the public sphere and outsourcing to the private sector, it has not restricted the reach of government intervention. On the contrary, it has become increasingly involved in certain sectors, including social policy and housing. It has managed this through an indirect approach that relies on intermediaries and private allies such as the businesses and associations that is has encouraged. In this way, the JDP has developed and systematized modes of redistribution that involve the participation of conservative businessmen who benefit from their proximity to the decision-makers, charitable organizations, and underprivileged social groups. These public policies have reconfigured different social sectors in a way that has strengthened the Party’s influence.
- Topic:
- Civil Society, Sociology, Governance, Regulation, Political Science, and Networks
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Turkey, Middle East, Asia, and Balkans
120. From Juvenile System Reform to a Conflict of Civilizations in Contemporary Russian Society (De la réforme de la justice des mineurs au conflit de civilisations dans la société russe contemporaine)
- Author:
- Kathy Rousselet
- Publication Date:
- 06-2014
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
- Abstract:
- Youth delinquency has been a hot topic in Russian society for many years. Numerous associations, NGOs and international organizations have raised public awareness of the problem and have encouraged the government to place judicial reform on its agenda. However, debate over how to apply it, the various possible models and how to structure the relationship between social and judicial institutions has been limited. Discussion has instead focused on the relative priorities to be given to the interests of children versus those of the family, so-called “traditional” versus “liberal” values, and the extent to which the State should interfere in the private lives of Russian citizens. Discussion of the actual situation of children at risk and the concrete problems posed by reform have been overshadowed by rumors, encouraged by a discourse of fear in an increasingly violent society that tend to distort the real problems. Additionally, implementation of international norms and judicial reform has been largely blocked by the patriotic agenda of the State.
- Topic:
- Crime, Democratization, Human Rights, Sociology, Prisons/Penal Systems, Reform, Children, Youth, and Political Science
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, and Asia