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Politics
New Texts Out Now: Maya Mikdashi, What is Settler Colonialism? and Sherene Seikaly, Return to the Present
![[The Wall. Image by Sherene Seikaly]](/content_images/3/sm_noname.jpeg.jpg "[The Wall. Image by Sherene Seikaly]")
Maya Mikdashi, “What Is Settler Colonialism?” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37:2 (2013) Sherene Seikaly, “Return to the Present,” Elisabeth Weber, editor, Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write these pieces? Maya Mikdashi (MM): I had visited my mother's family in Michigan and gone to the reservation for a holiday. Prior to this trip and to reading through my deceased grandfather's piles and piles of papers documenting his family's history, I felt very uneasy with my own interest in settler colonialism in the United States ...
Keep Reading »The Ongoing Nakba: The Forcible Displacement of the Palestinian People
![[Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights Map]](/content_images/3/sm_BADILmap.jpg "[Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights Map]")
Israeli practices and policies are a combination of apartheid, military occupation, and colonization. Together, they aim to ethnically cleanse the territory of historic Palestine from its indigenous Palestinian presence. This Israeli regime is not limited to the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), but it also targets Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line as well as those living in forced exile. Reflections on whether a one or a two-state solution would be the appropriate means to end the injustice and suffering in historic Palestine overlook the fact that one legal entity has already been established within ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Joel Beinin, Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine
Joel Beinin, “Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Joel Beinin (JB): It grew out of a conference on late Ottoman Palestine at the University of Lausanne. I was invited to make a link between the democratic possibilities opened by the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the state of affairs one hundred years later. We tend to think we have made a lot of progress since then. With respect to the question of co-existence of the ethno-national and religious communities in Palestine, it seems the opposite has occurred. J: What ...
Keep Reading »The Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary Issue
[Jadaliyya will be posting excerpts from the Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary issue. What follows is the Editor's Note and Table of Contents from that issue.] Editor’s Note We can scarcely believe that two decades have passed since the publication of the first issue of the Arab Studies Journal. We are proud and humbled to have published groundbreaking work by scholars at the onset of their careers as well as at the pinnacle. During the last twenty years, the Journal has taken part in extraordinary changes in the field of Middle Eastern studies: paradigm shifts (and, on occasion, returns), the growth of once-nascent fields (like gender and sexuality ...
Keep Reading »The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
Vijay Prashad. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Forward by Boutros Boutros-Ghali. London and New York: Verso, 2012. Correct ideas are never sufficient; they are not believed or enacted simply because they are right. They become the ideas of the time only when they are wielded by those who have a united belief in their own power, using it in ideological and institutional struggles that, in turn, consolidate their social authority. - Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations On 15 November 1975, the leaders of the newly formed G7 met at Chateau de Rambouillet, the French President’s summer residence located thirty miles southwest of Paris. The G7 had ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon
Wendy Pearlman, “Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Wendy Pearlman (WP): Five years ago I began to read widely about Lebanon in preparation for a trip there. While there are so many fascinating things about the country, I was most intrigued by its one hundred and fifty-year history with international emigration. There is hardly a corner of the globe in which Lebanese have not settled, and the worldwide diaspora of Lebanese origin outnumbers those living within Lebanon’s borders. Today, an estimated ten to twenty-five percent of Lebanese nationals ...
Keep Reading »Egyptian Women: Between Revolution, Counter-Revolution, Orientalism, and "Authenticity"
![[Samira Ibrahim versus Aliaa El-Mahdi. Photo by Suzeeinthecity]](/content_images/3/sm_samiraibrahimvsaliaaelmahdi.jpg "[Samira Ibrahim versus Aliaa El-Mahdi. Photo by Suzeeinthecity]")
The Egyptian revolution appears to present a “gender paradox.” On the one hand, women have been marginalized in many formal political institutions since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak. On the other hand, representations and images of women and women’s bodies have been ubiquitous. Representations of women through media and art, as well as the regulation of women’s sexuality through state laws and constitutions are an essential part of defining national identity and national difference, marking the boundaries between “them” and “us” and constituting the national polity. Representations of women and particular gender orders are also used as symbolic markers to ...
Keep Reading »Why Domestic Politics Still Matter in Iran’s Nuclear Policymaking
![[Image of campaign posters in Iran. Image by Beshef/Flickr.]](/content_images/3/sm_7823623ScreenShot2013-05-03at10.37.16PM.png "[Image of campaign posters in Iran. Image by Beshef/Flickr.]")
The first round of nuclear talks in Kazakhstan raised optimism on the prospect of reaching a diplomatic solution for Iran’s nuclear crisis. Sanctions are crushing Iran’s economy. Meanwhile, the turmoil in its ally Syria and the rise of Sunni Islamism in the Middle East is undermining Iran’s strategic position. The overall regional and domestic situation appears to have forced Iran to revise its nuclear approach. Therefore, not surprisingly, Iran started the first round of recent nuclear talks with a relatively milder position. As usual, the negotiations failed, but this time it was due to a different reason: the domestic concerns of Iranian leaders. As a senior diplomat ...
Keep Reading »Not in the Revolution's Name: Egypt's New Judicial Authority Bill
Amid the recurrent standoffs between the Egyptian opposition on the one hand and President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood group from which he hails on the other, the opposition is often characterized as incompetent, opportunistic and unwilling to accept the outcome of democracy, in reference to the results of the elections that brought Morsi to the presidency and handed the Muslim Brotherhoods' Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) a majority in parliament. But the policies and steps taken by the president and his party, and vigorously supported by the Brotherhood's members in a number of street demonstrations, need to be measured against core democratic ...
Keep Reading »The Terror of Capitalism
![[In the rubble of Rana Plaza. Image by Taslima Akhter.]](/content_images/3/sm_ScreenShot2013-04-29at9.29.04AM.png "[In the rubble of Rana Plaza. Image by Taslima Akhter.]")
Delhi. On Wednesday, 24 April, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed. The building, Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia through Bangladesh’s machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Famous name brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the satanic shelves of Wal-Mart. Rescue workers were able to save two thousand people as of this writing, with confirmation that over three hundred are dead. The numbers for the ...
Keep Reading »Thinking Citizenship in a Revolutionary Arab World: The Intransigence of Difference
![[The Perfect Arab Citizen. Illustration by Khalid Albaih]](/content_images/3/sm_5592776649_a46391463d.jpg "[The Perfect Arab Citizen. Illustration by Khalid Albaih]")
The ongoing Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia in late 2010 have demonstrated that citizenship in the Arab Middle East is a subject in need of much critical scholarship and intervention. Many scholars, working from an archive of political philosophy that begins with Rousseau's social contract, have assessed the Arab national project of producing citizens skeptically, as Suad Joseph has demonstrated. Moreover, there is tendency in political theory to view members of authoritarian, corporatist, and brutal states as “subjects” rather than “citizens.” As Lisa Wedeen, Mahmoud Mamdani, Rogers Brubacker, and others have argued, in such studies, citizenship appears as a ...
Keep Reading »Contested Citizenship in Egypt
Clashes over the Khusus killings in Egypt are the most recent of a long list of tragic sectarian episodes since 2011. Paul Sedra is right that “the impulse to lay the blame for this sectarianism at the feet of the Muslim Brotherhood is strong and…not without justification.” It is small wonder that the Brotherhood’s hyper-politicization of religion and religious difference at this juncture in Egyptian history would enable the radical escalation of conflict between individuals during what might under other circumstances be rudimentary or even banal interactions. In Sedra’s estimation, the tendency to look upon Coptic Christians in Egypt as members of a unitary and ...
Keep Reading »An Ongoing Displacement: The Forced Exile of the Palestinians
15 May 2013 marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from the territory that became Israel. In 1948, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed more than fifty percent of the entire Palestinian population. In commemoration of the Nakba, and the displacement that continues today, Visualizing Palestine has released this new visual: "An Ongoing Displacement." The new visual quantitatively catalogues the multiple dimensions of Palestinian displacement ...
Keep Reading »Nakba 2013: The Palestinian Youth Movement Commemorates 65 Years of Al Nakba (Introduction)
The fifteenth of May 2013 marks the sixty-fifth commemoration of the day the oppressive Zionist state came into being. It also marks sixty-five years from the beginning of our collective fragmentation and simultaneous resistance. This current period that we are living also marks a significant shift in our history not only as Palestinians, but as Arabs, colonized, and young people of today’s world. While there are strong sentiments of brokenness and rupture of Palestinian and Arab ...
Keep Reading »The Brothers, the Revolution, and the Right to Protest
A new political order always arrives with a package of legislation establishing its political and socioeconomic orientations as law. In its broad sense, a revolution effects a “fundamental change” in the political and economic order, with the support of the majority of the people.[1] Egypt experienced this shortly after the 1952 Free Officers’ coup d’état, as it developed into the July Revolution.[2] Egypt’s second experience in this regard came with President Anwar Al-Sadat’s accession to power, and ...
Keep Reading »The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some ...
Keep Reading »The Facade of Political Crises in Morocco
This weekend, the conservative nationalist Istiqlal Party announced it will be withdrawing from the government coalition, led by the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), and will take its place in parliament's opposition. Its reason, according to the party's press release, was to "avoid being complicit in the scheme against the Moroccan people." Additionally, the party will maintain its cabinet positions until further notice, and the party has written a formal letter to King ...
Keep Reading »Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History
Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] Today human rights provides a dominant framework for thinking about humanity—one in which humanity often appears as both a universal and an ahistorical category. In this view, the history of humanity is one of the discovery of otherwise hidden or ...
Keep Reading »Algeria Between “la Boulitique” and la Politique: A Tale of Two Youths
La politique est une réflexion sur la manière de servir le peuple. La «boulitique» est une somme de hurlements et de gesticulations pour se servir du peuple. La politique is a reflection on the manner to serve the people. La boulitique is an accumulation of screams and gestures (invoked) in order to use the people. - Malek Benabi Rarely is the noise in Algiers as deafening, or the traffic as disorderly. If young Algerians are often depicted as hittistes, hanging out in public spaces with no ...
Keep Reading »Libya: Which Fate for Gaddafi’s Henchmen?
On 24 March 2013, about 200 former rebel fighters in Libya besieged the prime minister's office, demanding that he resign in accordance with a political isolation law banning members of the former regime from political life. Ali Zeidan, the current prime minister of Libya, served as a diplomat under Gaddafi. The draft political isolation law being debated applies to anybody who held an official position during the final two decades of Gaddafi’s rule, which includes many who have played a prominent ...
Keep Reading »Among the Thugs
Delhi. “We are mere coolies working at the machines in these terrible times. We are mere dupes and fools to discover the diamond and to make a gift of it to the king, to adorn his crown.” – Nazrul Islam. Sohel Rana is a well-known figure in South Asia. He is the guy who, in my youth, would stand at the street-corner, holding court with a bunch of toughs, and offering his threatening ways as protection or intimidation for payment. As South Asian countries entered the pact of globalisation, ...
Keep Reading »Salman al-Awdah: In the Shadow of Revolutions
There is nothing that prompts us to encourage revolution as it is enshrined in danger...It just comes when profound reform has stumbled.— Salman al-Awdah Like all of us watching the Arab world in the last two years, Saudi Islamists (I refer throughout to the Salafi Islamists) were taken by surprise when the Arab masses marched en masse calling for the downfall of their regimes. Official Saudi religious scholars immediately warned against the chaos of revolutions, banned demonstrations, and called for ...
Keep Reading »Liberal Illusions
With the deepening of a political stalemate between the government and the opposition in Egypt and the marked deterioration of economic conditions, critics of the January 25 Revolution continue to highlight what they view as the revolution’s failure to bring about a stable political order that can live up to the many political and economic challenges Egypt confronts today. In his always-illustrious column in Al-Masry Al-Youm, Abdel Moneim Saeed eloquently articulated this consensus over successive ...
Keep Reading »March Madness: Theirs and Ours
March Madness: Theirs and Ours [The following Month in Review on Washington's Wars and Occupations was written by Michael Reagan and published on 31 March 2013 in War Times.] It's March and despite what you read on the sports pages, the real madness in the country isn't on the basketball court. It's on the streets of New York, where police murder another Black teenager. It's in Steubenville, Ohio, where a teenage girl is raped by high school athletes and a culture of misogyny ...
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The creative power of fun enables camp youths to give new meaning to the notion of “Palestinianness”, and a new form to their allegiance to Palestinian nationalism, one more suited to their desire to live life in Jordan.click | email | tweet
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View All Entries »- Reports Roundup (May 18)
- Injuries, Arrests and House Raids: The Case of a Bahraini Family
- الليبرالية الفلسطينية أمام القضاء الإسرائيلي
- ما هي النكبة؟
- Academic Freedom and the Middle East: A Handbook for Teaching and Research
- Syria's Inglorious Basterd
- Maghreb Media Roundup (May 17)
- Buckling to Bigotry: The Newseum Dishonors Murdered Palestinian Journalists
- كتب: أطفال الندى
- Statement of the Arab and Middle East Journalists Association in Reference to Newseum Scandal
- New Texts Out Now: Maya Mikdashi, What is Settler Colonialism? and Sherene Seikaly, Return to the Present
- On the Margins Roundup (May)
- On the American Association of University Professors' Opposition to Academic Boycotts
- The Palestinian Museum: An Agent Of Empowerment And Integration For Palestinians
- An Ongoing Displacement: The Forced Exile of the Palestinians
- Syria Media Roundup (May 16)
- The Ongoing Nakba: The Forcible Displacement of the Palestinian People
- Nakba 2013: The Palestinian Youth Movement Commemorates 65 Years of Al Nakba (Introduction)
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