North African Women after the Arab Spring

2017 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Stoyanova-Encheva ◽  
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◽  

Egypt is a country that fascinates with ancient treasures that have become a heritage, but the unstable situation in the country leads to an outflow of tourists and subsequently causes economic collapse. The beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2010 marked the beginning of a radical change in the political and economic structure of North African and Middle Eastern countries. After the Arab Spring protests, the socio-economic and political situation in Egypt is constantly changing. Numerous political protests, political assassinations of key figures and a number of terrorist attacks have taken place, which lead to the complete decline of the tourism industry both in the country and throughout the region.


Author(s):  
Derek Lutterbeck

Coup-proofing—that is, measures aimed at preventing military coups and ensuring military loyalty—has been a key feature of civil–military relations in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states. Just as the MENA region has been one of the most coup-prone regions in the world, coup-proofing has been an essential instrument of regime survival in Arab countries. The most commonly found coup-proofing strategies in the region include (a) so-called “communal coup-proofing,” involving the appointment of individuals to key positions within the military based on family, ethnic, or religious ties; (b) providing the military with corporate and/or private benefits in order to ensure its loyalty; (c) creating parallel military forces in addition to the regular military, so as to “counter-balance” the latter; (d) monitoring of the military through a vast internal security and intelligence apparatus; and (e) promoting professionalism, and thus political neutrality, within the military. The experiences of the “Arab Spring,” however, have shown that not all of these strategies are equally effective in ensuring military loyalty during times of popular upheavals and regime crises. A common finding in this context has been that communal coup-proofing (or militaries based on “patrimonialism”) creates the strongest bonds been the armed forces and their regimes, as evidenced by the forceful suppression of the popular uprising by the military in countries such as Syria, or by parts of the military in Libya and Yemen. By contrast, where coup-proofing has been based on the provision of material benefits to the military or on counterbalancing, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the armed forces have refrained from suppressing the popular uprising, ultimately leading to the downfall of these countries’ long-standing leaders. A further lesson that can be drawn from the Arab Spring in terms of coup-proofing is that students of both military coups and coup-proofing should dedicate (much) more attention to the increasingly important role played by the internal security apparatus in MENA countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-430
Author(s):  
Aymen Hraiba ◽  
Mehmed Ganić ◽  
Azra Branković

The paper aims to empirically explore the impact of the Arabic Spring on the outflow of FDI in twelve selected countries in the North Africa region (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Egypt and Mauritania) and the Mideast region (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates). The paper employs a panel data approach to exploit the time series nature of the relationship between FDI Outwards and its determinants (the market size, trade openness, government effectiveness, inflation and three dummy variables related to the Arab Spring) between 2000 and 2016. The findings revealed that the impact of the Arab Spring estimator is negatively correlated with FDI Outflows in the countries that witnessed the Arab Spring. It implies that conflicts and instability negatively affect FDI outflows. The findings of this study reveal that countries that have been affected by the Arab Spring directly (the North Africa region) experienced a greater decline of FDI outflows than countries that have been indirectly affected (the Mideast region). When the sample is restricted to North Africa it is shown that the FDI outflows may be influenced by the post Arab Spring effect, while there is no such statistically significant effect in the Mideast region. Thus, the study finds that FDI outflows in the North African countries are more determined by the effects of Arabic Spring countries than in the Mideastern countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Sadiqi

This essay investigates and contextualises the emergence and evolution of the discipline of ‘Language and Gender’ in North Africa in an attempt to remedy the underrepresentation of this region in scholarship. I ground this essay in my experiences with Language and Gender in Morocco and the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), both of which were central in shaping my academic journey. The pre- and post-Uprisings periods surrounding what is often discussed as the ‘Arab Spring’ in the early 2010s carried serious consequences for the emergence of Language and Gender as a discipline. These moments and my involvement in them were deeply impacted by specific historical, sociopolitical and intellectual dimensions, most saliently the women’s movement and the discipline of linguistics. My essay draws on these experiences to advocate for the importance of decolonising the international language and gender canon with North African perspectives that move beyond English and the Global North.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Mühlberger

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