Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-316
Author(s):  
Rabab El-Mahdi ◽  
Ellen Lust
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Procedural Outcomes

The nation-state is in crisis. The increasing mobility of capital and information, unprecedented waves of people moving across borders, and rise of actors, such as ISIS, unwilling to abide by the rules of the Westphalian system, challenge the very notion of territoriality, citizenship, sovereignty, and the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Studies on the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab uprisings took the region by storm, upending “conventional wisdom” held by many political scientists and scholars, have focused largely on the causes, genealogy, and procedural outcomes of the events. These are important, but as we shall see, the uprisings also highlighted the need to think carefully about how the modern state has changed, is being adapted, or has been superseded. How is the “state,” a foundational conceptual construct in the social sciences, to be located in light of these events? And to what extent do the concepts we employ and the language we use accurately reflect and allow us to interrogate realities, or do they obscure them? This roundtable aims to spark this much-needed discussion.

Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 228-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland G. Fryer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
First Century ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Lethal Force ◽  
The Social

Police use of force, particularly lethal force, is one of the most divisive issues of the twenty-first century. To understand the nexus of race, criminal justice, and police brutality, academics and journalists have begun to amass impressive datasets on officer-involved-shootings (OIS). I compare the data and methods of three investigative journalism articles and two publications in the social sciences on a set of five rubrics and conclude that the stark differences between their findings are due to differences in what qualifies for a valid research design and not underlying differences in the datasets.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Building a global scientific community

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-122
Author(s):  
Stefan Bargheer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
European Research ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social

The three volumes reviewed in this essay assemble over 40 case studies written by more than 50 contributors that trace the development of the social sciences and humanities in Europe (East and West) and a number of countries in Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia. Two of these volumes grew out of the European research project ‘International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities’ (INTERCO-SSH); the third volume extends the focus of this project to Eastern Europe. A particularly innovative aspect shared by all contributions is the application of a transnational research perspective.

The Political Science Discipline in Argentina: The Political Scientist's National Association's Role

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Science Discipline ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

scholarly journals Democratic disillusionment? Desire for democracy after the Arab uprisings

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Spierings
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Liberalization ◽  
Democratic Attitudes ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
Case Comparison ◽  
Systematic Explanation

Have the Arab uprisings influenced the desire for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa? This study presents a systematic explanation of the different impact the uprisings had on people’s desire for democracy across the region. It applies the relatively new consequence-based theory of democratic attitudes, and integrates the notion of deprivation into it. The expectations derived from this framework are tested empirically by examining data from 45 public opinion surveys in 11 Middle East and North Africa countries (2001–2014) and combining them with a systematic country-level case comparison. The study shows that the desire for democracy drops mainly in countries of major protest and initial political liberalization, but no substantial democratization (e.g. Egypt, Morocco) indeed, and that a lack of major protest or initial reform (e.g. Algeria, Yemen) ‘prevents’ disillusionment. The seemingly exceptional Lebanese and Tunisian cases also show the mechanism holds for specific groups in society: Lebanese Sunnis and the poorest Tunisians.

French Doctoral Dissertations on The Near East and North Africa. Part I: Thesis Submitted 1970–1974

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Joel Montague
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Near East ◽  
French Language ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
Considerable Detail

The published literature—books, articles and monographs—in the French language on the Near East and North Africa is well-known and of remarkable value to the scholar and traveler interested in the Islamic world. Less accessible and, of course, less well-known, particularly in anglophone countries, are the often unpublished doctoral dissertations submitted to French universities. It has thus seemed useful to prepare a short bibliography covering some of the more recently completed thesis. The list is not exhaustive, even within the social sciences and humanities, and some of the citations are incomplete although, hopefully, not too often inaccurate. The dissertations covered are the Doctorat d’état, roughly equivalent to the Ph.D., the Doctorat d’université, and the Doctorat de specialité (3ème cycle). The legal and other requirements for the degrees are available in considerable detail in the Journal officiel de la République Française, May 2, 1974, pp. 4668–4672.

scholarly journals Women of Fes

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Emilio Spadola
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Family Code ◽  
Mega Cities

The city of Fes, the once “bourgeois citadel” (J. Berque’s words) of Moroccoand once the world’s most populous city (1170-80), has in modernity beenunhappily bypassed for coastal trading hubs and global mega-cities. Materialand symbolic elements of Fassi power persist, however, and anthropologistRachel Newcomb’s finely researched and written ethnography identifies them in upper-middle-class women’s gender identity. In so doing, Women ofFes helps the fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and Islamicstudies to illuminate the often-neglected power of class to shape gender in theMuslim Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating, not pointedly, thatclass divides women within as much as across cultures.Newcomb’s book concerns women of, not merely in, Fes, namely, a classof women of “original” Fassi families navigating the social ruins and newopportunities of daily urban life. Its disparate topics – urban rumors, women’sNGOs, reforms of the Moroccan Muslim family code (mudawanah), flexiblekinship, public space, a dépassé lounge singer – shift the book’s centerfrom class to gender and public life. Her skillful identification of class issueswithin the latter, however, gives the book a necessary coherence ...

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document