Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
Tadween Publishing Blog is here! Check it out
Jadaliyya's first book is now available! Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Regional Analysis
Call for Papers: CSU Conference on Middle Eastern Studies (October 15-16, 2011)
Call for Proposals: The 4th Annual CSU Conference On Middle Eastern Studies October 15-16, 2011 at Cal Poly Pomona Recent uprisings against autocratic and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and North Africa shattered many myths and stereotypes about Arab and Islamic societies. Led largely by youth, these movements are historic events of momentous significance. A new Middle East is in the making. Whatever the final outcome of these upheavals may be, these developments have local, regional, and global implications. The 4th Annual CSU Conference on Middle Eastern Studies invites scholars, experts, and graduate and undergraduate students to submit papers and ...
Keep Reading »Panel Summaries for Day 2 of Jadaliyya's "Teaching the Middle East" Conference
Panel 4: Peripheries and Exceptions The second day of the conference began with a panel that focused on states and issues that have been marginal to the dominant discourses about the Arab uprisings. However, the goal of the panel itself was to highlight the actual centrality of these issues to a deeper understating of these uprisings and their consequences for teaching the Middle East. Asli Bali, in her “Comparative and International Law of the Middle East After the Uprisings: Re-assessing the State of the Arab State,” highlighted the ways in which “law” is exceptionalized in Middle East studies and, in turn, how the Middle East is viewed as exceptional in legal ...
Keep Reading »Panel Summaries from Day 1 of Jadaliyya's "Teaching the Middle East" Conference
![[Image from Jadaliyya archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_dayone.jpg "[Image from Jadaliyya archive.]")
Panel 1: Focus on Egypt The conference panels were kicked off by a panel that used Egypt as a case-study, both in terms of understanding the dynamics of one particular uprising as well as thinking specifically about the pedagogical implications of that uprising on the teaching of Egyptian history and contemporary politics. Joel Beinin, in his presentation entitled "Workers and Egypt’s January 25th Revolution: Shifting the Discussion from Autocracy/Democracy to Political Economy and Equity," argued that a political economy approach is vital to understanding and talking about events that have been described as "the Egyptian revolution." For Beinin, the ...
Keep Reading »Call for Papers: Covering the Arab Spring (September 1-2, 2011)
![[The University of Copenhagen. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_Uni-Uni.jpg "[The University of Copenhagen. Image from unknown archive.]")
The University of Copenhagen invites proposals for the two day conference: COVERING THE ARAB SPRING. The MIDDLE EAST IN THE MEDIA – THE MEDIA IN THE MIDDLE EAST (Copenhagen, September 1-2, 2011) This conference seeks to bring together scholars from various disciplines to exchange their descriptions and analyses of different national perspectives in the coverage of events in Arab countries throughout the first half of the year 2011 that have been referred to as the Arab Spring. Media coverage and international visibility played a big role not only for the sake of being informed about events in another city, nation or region but it was a major catalyst and tool ...
Keep Reading »A Critique of Reporting on the Middle East
![[Image from CNN]](/content_images/3/sm_AConAM.png "[Image from CNN]")
I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve labored to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at the New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America I wouldn’t be published if it wasn’t about jihad. Too often consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You ...
Keep Reading »Tribes of Libya as the Third Front: Myths and Realities of Non-State Actors in the Long Battle for Misrata
Recent news reports originating from Libyan state media have Libyan tribes sending representatives to the rebels in Misrata, hoping to negotiate for peace and for control of the city. An April 24 article in The Guardian quoted Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, as threatening a “very bloody” assault against the rebels in Misrata if they fail to negotiate. “I hope to God we can avoid this,” Kaim lamented to The Guardian. Why do Qaddafi’s tales of “tribal” identities mobilizing against rebels gain traction in the international media, whereas other Libyan government pronouncements (about cease-fires and civilian casualties, for example) are greeted with ...
Keep Reading »Prospects for the Sectarian Terrain (Part II)
![[Image from unknown source.]](/content_images/3/sm_Sunni-Shia-Disrribution3.jpg "[Image from unknown source.]")
[Read Part I here.] On the afternoon of 17 March there was a government-supported demonstration in Baghdad's Karada neighborhood. About 100 demonstrators were provided with police escorts who closed the road on their behalf, unlike the police resistance protestors usually face in Iraq. Protestors carried banners stating they were from the “Khafija tribe, Beni Sa'd tribe and the people of Karada.” One banner stated: “The Beni Sa‘d tribe condmens the Saudi intervention that is killing our brothers in Bahrain." Another stated: "Patience oh Sauds, the Mahdi Muhammad is coming." And another stated: "Oh infidels oh infidels why are you killing the ...
Keep Reading »On the Re-Mythification of the Arab
![[Image from unknown source.]](/content_images/3/sm_index.jpg "[Image from unknown source.]")
Accompanying the ongoing events in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya has been an emerging narrative of an “Arab awakening” that has been launched by so-called Arab revolutionaries. One can see this slogan, “the Arab Awakening,” promoted through various media, not least by the increasingly popular Al-Jazeera news channel. In a recent article entitled “It’s Arab and it’s Personal” the “awakening” is declared to have the power to “rewrite history” ultimately unifying the “Arabs” in their goals and slogans. The “Arab street” is boiling with its internet-connected “youth” and we get fancy catch phrases like Uri Avnery’s “the genie is out of the bottle.” ...
Keep Reading »New MERIP Issue on People Power: A Must-Read!
[Below is MERIP's press release introducing the new issue titled "People Power." Jadaliyya Reports presents it as a "Must-Read" issue!] Revolution is a weighty word, one as freighted with past disappointments as with hope for the future. The fate of the midwinter political revolutions in the Arab world is far from determined, as forces of counter-revolution have rallied. But, along with army officers and lords of finance, any balance sheet must also account for another actor—the peoples of the region. “People Power,” the spring 2011 issue of Middle East Report, documents their inspiring struggles. Mona El-Ghobashy offers a magisterial close reading ...
Keep Reading »How to Lose Friends and Alienate Your People
![[Image from the author's upcoming book, Image Politics in the Middle East]]](/content_images/3/sm_aynama.jpg "[Image from the author's upcoming book, Image Politics in the Middle East]]")
The extraordinary events that have been gripping the Arab world since December 2010 have demonstrated the steadfastness of Arab citizens across the region in the face of despotic regimes. But they have also demonstrated that Arab despots indeed engage in authoritarian learning. From Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Libya to Morocco to Yemen to Syria (and the list goes on), Arab rulers have followed a peculiarly familiar pattern in the way they have—and are—responding to the protests calling for regime change. 1. Ignore the protests One of the first reactions to budding protests is simply to ignore them and their potential. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ...
Keep Reading »Preliminary Historical Observations on the Arab Revolutions of 2011
![[Image from la.indymedia.org]](/content_images/3/sm_2011-arab-revolution-tunisia-egypt-bahrain-libya.jpgmid.jpg "[Image from la.indymedia.org]")
Towards the end of his long, eventful life, in 1402, the renowned Arab historian Ibn Khaldun was in Damascus. He left us a description of Taymur’s siege of the city and of his meeting with the world conqueror. None of us is Ibn Khaldun, but any Arab historian today watching the Arab revolutions of 2011 has the sense of awe that our forbear must have had as we witness a great turning in world affairs. This juncture may be unprecedented in modern Arab history. Suddenly, despotic regimes that have been entrenched for fourty years and more seem vulnerable. Two of them – in Tunis and then in Cairo – crumbled before our eyes in a few weeks. Others in Tripoli and Sanaa are ...
Keep Reading »Abduh al-Fallah: Elite Myths and Popular Uprisings
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_11-arab-uprisings11.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
The refrain “al-sha‘b/yu-rîd/is-qât/al-ni-zâm” has proven resiliently mobile: it rang out in Tunisia, echoed in Tahrir, traveled west to Libya and Algeria, and east to Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. A central part of this poetic and exhilarating refrain is al-sha’b: the people. How do we understand the people today when the term has come to be at best a glorified, naïve idea and at worst a stale concept? As we witness popular mass mobilization overthrow some of the most entrenched and ostensibly stable regimes in the region, the time has come to revisit the political meaning of al-sha’b. Giorgio Agamben reminds us: “Any interpretation of the political meaning of the ...
Keep Reading »"Teaching the Middle East" Conference: Conclusions and Moving Forward
The best way to conclude this summary and discussion of “Teaching the Middle East” — indeed, given the structure of the conference and the nature of the conversations, as set out by Bassam Haddad in his opening remarks and reiterated in his remarks before the two closing panels, the only way to conclude — is that the discussions that began at this conference have not yet concluded. Indeed, these discussions are really only getting started. This was part of the conception of the conference itself: as ...
Keep Reading »Introduction: Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions . . . Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism
May 13-14, 2011, George Mason University “Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions…Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism,” a conference sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program and the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, and by the Arab Studies Institute (which includes Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya), brought together forty participants for an intense two-day conversation regarding the future of ...
Keep Reading »Three Powerfully Wrong--and Wrongly Powerful--American Narratives about the Arab Spring
The “Arab Spring” that actually began in the dead of winter has spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria…and the year only half over. As the media, policymakers, and global audiences struggle to make sense of changes that have inspired hundreds of millions to “just say no” to decades of dictatorship, a number of narratives have taken hold in the US—evident in remarks on cable news talk shows, at academic and policy symposia, and on Twitter—about precisely what is ...
Keep Reading »The Arab World's Forgotten Rebellions: Foreign Workers and Biopolitics in the Gulf
The Arab world is undergoing a potentially world-historical transformation. The Tunisian street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi’s self-imolation, following mistreatment by state authorities in late 2010, sparked a deluge of populist anger and activism that has toppled the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively, soon to be followed by street demonstrations and battles across the region. At the time of this writing, Libyan rebels in alliance with a NATO coalition are battling Qaddafi ...
Keep Reading »Awakening, Cataclysm, or Just a Series of Events? Reflections on the Current Wave of Protest in the Arab World
Perhaps the best starting point for understanding the current remarkable wave of protest spreading across the Arab world, would be to examine the nomenclature used to describe or frame it. To some observers it is seen as a ‘cataclysm.’ Others speak of the ‘contagion effect’. Still others might see it as simply a series of (fortunate or unfortunate) events not significantly related to each other. The terminology we use influences the conclusions we draw. We can see this if ...
Keep Reading »The Arab Uprisings and US Policy (Panel Video)
On Thursday, April 28th, 2011, the Middle East Policy Coucil held a one-day conference on Capitol Hill in Washingtong D.C., "featuring a discussion of the populist movements sweeping across the Arab world, their regional and global consequences, and how they are impacting U.S. interests and policy choices." Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad was one of the speakers at the conference, as were Anthony Cordesman (Center for Strategic International Studies), Barak Barfi (New American ...
Keep Reading »Prospects for the Sectarian Terrain (Part I)
On 22 March, Sha‘lan Sharif wrote an article in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in al-Akhbar, the Arab world’s leading leftist newspaper. Sharif compared “the Jewish question” in pre holocaust Europe to the “Shiite question” of today. Jews were accused of conspiring against Europe, and against mankind throughout the ages, like rats carrying the plague, according to the Nazis. Just as Jews could not be trusted so too Shiites were accused of taqiyya, or dissimulation to conceal their ...
Keep Reading »Essential Readings: Reading Pakistan
Here are the stripped down facts: Pakistan is roughly 165 million people. Most of us are young: 69 percent of the population is under age 30. And we’re poor. Almost a quarter of the people here live below the poverty line. As I write, the quarter-finals for the cricket world cup are underway. Pakistan’s unpredictable and occasionally magnificent team is playing the West Indies. The sport, which was a kind of civilizing project to teach Victorian mores, has become a national obsession. Beyond ...
Keep Reading »Securing the People (or State?): Efforts in Governing Through Fear
Traditionally conceptualised as pertaining to the state and achieved through its safeguarding against the interests (territorial or otherwise) of other states, security has become an increasingly and intensely contested concept. Two assumptions that structured the field of security studies – grounding the meaning of security and determining the mechanisms and strategies for its attainment – have been fundamentally challenged. The widening and deepening of the security agenda[1] has called into question ...
Keep Reading »Is the 2011 Libyan Revolution an Exception?
After the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the strong man of the Middle East on February 11, 2011, the Arab Spring appeared to be an unrelenting force. In the week following his downfall, three theaters of major rebellion—Libya, Yemen, Bahrain—quickly emerged, with Iran’s suppressed Green revolution resurfacing for a while as well. In the weeks that followed mass demonstrations demanding significant political reforms continued or sprang up in countries such as Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti, ...
Keep Reading »Regional "Contagion" in the Arab World: For "Good" or "Worse?"
Although predicted by few, the current upheavals in several Arab countries reinvigorate commonplace perceptions of the countries and peoples in the Arab world and the Middle East at large as constituting a densely intertwined, interconnected and bounded region. When Tunisian protestors expelled their dictator, parallels were quickly drawn with Mubarak’s rule in Egypt, prompting mass mobilization there and causing a similar exit of this country’s long-standing ruler. In their wake, anti-regime protestors ...
Keep Reading »Symposium on Arab World Diasporas and Migrations (Washington D.C., March 21-22)
[This symposium announcement was sent to Jadaliyya by the Center for Contemporary Arabs Studies (CCAS) at Georgetown University. The original announcement can be found here.] Center for Contemporary Arab Studies 2011 Annual Symposium: A Sense of Place: Arab World Diasporas and Migrations March 21-22 at Georgetown University. The voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from and to the Arab world has rarely received inclusive and comprehensive treatment by students and scholars of the region. ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
.jpg)
Brecht wrote once, "In the future, they will not say the times were dark. They will ask: Why were their poets silent?" Some poets were silent this spring, but many others weren't.click | email | tweet
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
Jadaliyya Features
.jpg)
Latest Entries
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)
- النكبة، هنا، الآن
- حول استبعاد النكبة الفلسطينية من دراسات الصدمة
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design