Let's do a MENA Academy Roundup
I haven't been able to post on here for a while because I've been traveling and frantically working to finish a few things, so I just wanted to catch up on a few things. The Middle East Political Science Podcast returns next week with a great new episode, and the next issue of POMEPS Studies which I've been editing also drops early next week. I also sent in the final manuscript for an incredible edited volume that we've been working for years and which is now entering production - can't wait to share more information on that soon! I've also got a piece in the works on the curious case of the Iran hawks, who spent two decades repeating a whole set of arguments about the virtues and ease of bombing Iran which have all been proven catastrophically wrong in practice but whose failed ideas seem to escape scrutiny.
I'm really excited to share that I've just received a grant from GW's Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics through the Knight Foundation to begin a new project on digital authoritarianism in the Middle East. It's a return to my roots in studying the Arab media and the political effects of the internet, and in some ways a continuation of the long-running Blogs and Bullets project with Sean Aday, Deen Freelon, Henry Farrell, John Sides and others over the years. This project focuses initially on AI and digital surveillance in the Middle East, building on my chapter in the recent book Steven Heydemann and I edited on the Arab state. The larger project ultimately will examine how the Arab public sphere has been reshaped, rewired, and reconfigured by social media platforms and how states have used those platforms as part of their authoritarian survival strategies. When I finish with my current project on the Middle Eastern warscape, I expect this to be my next big research agenda, so you'll all likely be hearing a lot about it.
Finally, while I was away, I was pleased to see a thoughtful review of America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region by Osamah Khalil in The Middle East Journal; he calls it "a scathing critique of United States foreign policy over three decades," though he thinks I'm too soft on Obama (fair enough, though the book does dissect his failures in detail; it describes them as the triumph of structure over agency, though, with every effort Obama took to change the Middle East failing in the face of the determined resistance of the forces of the defenders of the status quo, even including Trump's withdrawal from the JCPOA which just returned the situation to the pre-Obama realities).
But enough about me. Here's a few new publications worthy of attention out of the MENA Academy:
First, you don't want to miss a spectacular new issue of Middle East Report, the essential journal produced by MERIP over the course of decades: "Campus Politics: Palestine and the New University Order." It features a lead report by Torin Monahan on censorship and surveillance at American universities, followed by a roundtable on faculty activism featuring Lisa Hajjar, Lara Deeb, Darryl Li, Andrew Ross and Meera Shah and another roundtable with student protest organizers. Asli Bali discusses how MESA fought back with its successful lawsuit against the Trump administration. Finally there are reports on campus protests and repression in Germany, Egypt, and Turkey. As always, MER is essential reading for anyone interested in these issues – check it out.
Second, the Middle East Journal's spring issue features its new editorial style, with shorter and policy oriented articles mostly replacing the longer academic articles which had been the journal's hallmark. In addition to the review of my book mentioned above, it's got articles on US foreign policy, the Saudi-UAE rift (by April Alley), Thomas Juneau on how the Iran war has reshaped Tehran's relationship with the Houthis, and much more. There's also a new issue of Middle East Policy featuring a variety of articles on Jordan, Gaza, and Turkey. I have a backlog of standalone articles across the journals that I should be adding here, but it's Friday afternoon and I am so, so tired. See you Monday!
