Beyond Exception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Kanna ◽  
Amélie Le Renard ◽  
Neha Vora
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. It analyzes what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies studied. The book proposes ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. It asks: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central, rather than peripheral or exceptional, to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The book explores how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production.

The Jamahiriya Experiment in Libya: Qadhafi and Rousseau

1980 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami G. Hajjar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The World ◽  
Taking Charge ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Middle East Studies

Only a few social scientists outside the field of Middle East studies are aware that in the sovereign state of Libya today there is no government. Indeed, it is not likely to have one so long as the country's strongman, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi,1 continues to be the leader of the Libyan revolution. This has been the case ever since 2 March 1977, when the institution of government in its traditional legal-bureaucratic sense was dismantled, and the people's authority, exercised through people's congresses and committees, was proclaimed. By this action, Libya initiated in practice the so-called era of jamahiriya—the era of the masses and the practice of direct democracy – and has taken a number of steps in that direction. A recent example was the renaming of some of its embassies overseas as ‘people's bureaux’, with Libyan students and citizens taking charge of their functions and management.2 This action, instigated personally by Qadhafi, was intended to illustrate to the world that since Libya has no government, ordinary Libyan citizens overseas represent themselves directly to foreign peoples.

Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East within and across Disciplines: A Survey of PhD Dissertations, 2000–2010

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Bier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Academic Climate ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter surveys topical, methodological, and geographic trends in the production of knowledge about the Middle East in doctoral dissertations written over the decade 2000–2010. It assesses the extent to which the post-9/11 political and academic climate influenced knowledge production about the Middle East. It argues that while scholarship on the Middle East has undoubtedly been both constrained and inspired by geopolitics and the various political, popular, and media responses to 9/11, the relationship between the two is not necessarily coherent, unilinear, or predictable. Trends in Middle East studies (MES) are the product of changes in political climate, methodological currents within disciplines (themselves related to shifts in the post-Cold War geopolitical order), the peculiarities and engagements of MES as a distinct disciplinel, and the relationship between area studies and wider disciplinary norms, organizations, and institutions.

On Race, Sports, and Identity: Picking Up the Ball in Middle East Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun T. Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
International Competition ◽  
The World ◽  
Middle East Studies

In their love for sports, Egyptians are no different from people in other parts of the world. They follow closely their favorite local teams in national-cup competitions, the careers of those stars who have taken their games to professional clubs in Europe, and, of course, the fortunes of their national teams in international competition. Success, such as Egypt's victory in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations can draw millions into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in celebration. Losses can result in full-scale political investigations launched by President Hosni Mubarak.

The MESA Global Academy: Sustaining Knowledge Production Among MENA Scholars

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-317
Author(s):  
Mimi Kirk
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Research Collaborations ◽  
Academic Trajectory ◽  
Middle East Studies

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Global Academy is an initiative that sustains research collaborations and knowledge production among regionally-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. Spearheaded by MESA, the project is an expression of the scholarly field's commitment to scholarship in and from the region. By awarding scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America, and thereby enabling them to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project supports individuals whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.

scholarly journals SYSTEM OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD: ‘PERFECT STORM’

2016 ◽  
pp. 125-133
Author(s):  
M. M. Lebedeva
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Weak Link ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
Global System ◽  
The World ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Perfect Storm

The paper proposes to examine the modern political organization of the world as a global system consisting of three levels: Westphalian systems, system of international (interstate) relations, and political systems of states.It shows that all three levels are currently subject to a deep transformation that produces the effect of a 'perfect storm'. The Middle East due to a number of reasons is the most 'weak link', i.e. the link where these processes are manifested with the greatest force. Such situation, when all three levels are in a deep changing, is unique. The world has not previously faced with it. The article discusses possible scenarios for the further development of the system of political organization of the world.

Continuities—Personal and Institutional

2018 ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
The World

This chapter explores a series of continuities across a period of time—the sixth through the ninth centuries—that witnessed some of the most consequential changes in the late ancient world. In the seventh century, members of the dissident Miaphysite church were engaged in sophisticated translations from Greek into Syriac of a number of texts. These cultural efforts were undertaken apart from the Roman state. The development of cultural institutions among Middle Eastern Christian communities that existed and persisted independently from the state, and, even despite it, provided paths by which sophisticated ideas and cultural practices might be transmitted across centuries of great military upheaval and political discontinuity. What resulted is a non-state dependent bridge between the world of the late antique Roman-ruled Middle East and the world of medieval Abbasid Baghdad.

scholarly journals What Is It Like to Be a Nazi? Racial Vision and Scientific Selves in German Portrait Photographic Practice

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Katharina Mosha Skarpelis
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Novel Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Racial Knowledge ◽  
Point Of Departure

Default ways of reading others come with a host of problems, often caused by a lack of adequate tools for obtaining analytical and interpretive access to the phenomenon of interest; in the case of Nazis, this has led to a flattening of National Socialist racial thinking into a blunt racial essentialism that, as Ann Stoler put it, ignores nuance and conflicts in historical debates about race that are then juxtaposed to later, presumably more sophisticated, racial epistemologies (Stoler 2016). Horror at historical atrocities has led to a glossing over of significant variation in scientific and cultural practices that are consequential for our understanding of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes substantively, and for our ability as cultural and comparative historical sociologists to make claims about the past, methodologically and causally.What Is It Like to Be a Nazi employs Nagel’s paper as metaphorical point of departure to study not consciousness, but to more attentively interrogate the scientific practices of those whose ways of thinking and existing in the world seem so alien to us, as well as the practices of contemporary social science purporting to understanding National Socialist science. My contribution to this project consists in homing in on one historical form of racial knowledge production and visualization, that of portrait photographic practice. By choosing portrait photographers, the larger category of “Nazi” is narrowed down to a professional group who generated visual propaganda for the National Socialist regime and sustained the dictatorship by way of artistic production.How did National Socialist photographers generate “race” in images? Through an analysis of photographic instruction manuals, reflections of the image makers on their craft and the photographs themselves, I theorize three processes by which National Socialist-period photographers created race in images: contemplation, freezing, and sculpting. Photography, far from being a transcriptional art, brimmed with agency and was in constant disagreement about the nature of perception, and the best way of capturing phenomena occurring in the world through novel technologies. While local circumstances of photographic production under National Socialist rule at first glance appear excessively specific and perhaps exceptional, they raise more universal questions about perception, vision and interpretation that remain at issue today (Browne 2010; Morning 2011; Morning 2014; Nelson 2008).

Middle East Studies On-Line

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169
Author(s):  
Jon W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World Wide ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Change World ◽  
Mailing Lists ◽  
The World ◽  
On Line ◽  
A Site ◽  
Middle East Studies

Materials of Middle East studies and not just for Middle East studies are increasingly appearing on-line. The ‘Net (Internet) that brought file archives, newsgroups and mailing lists devoted to regional issues and material has become a publishing medium in the Web (World Wide Web) with more and more of the output of Middle East studies themselves. The Bulletin now has a site, or “homepage,” on the World Wide Web at http://www.cua.edu/www/mesabul with select articles from recent issues and connections to material on the MESA Bulletin Gopher.The World Wide Web has been the breakthrough technology for making the Internet user-friendly and mainstream. WWW hides the “computery” aspects of the Internet behind snappy graphics and an easy-to-use interface that together have fostered much recent press and commercial enthusiasm over “the Net,” such as: It’s similar to what the library was 100 years ago, or the telegraph. It will be bigger and better than television. We’re not talking about a 500-channel medium. We’re talking about 250,000 channels that speak across all borders It represents who we are, how we act, transact business and engage in relationships. The Internet is about information empowerment. I think it will change world culture. (Michael Wolff in Investor’s Business Daily 21 Sep 95, p. A8)This summer, the number of commercial Internet sites passed those of educational institutions. The Internet, in a sense, has graduated.

Power and Knowledge Revisited in Middle East Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mervat Hatem
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North American ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Professional Association ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
The World ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Middle East Studies

In thinking about a focus for the 2008 Presidential Address, I could not help but be influenced by the fact that this year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Edward Said’s seminal book on Orientalism. I chose to examine the connection between power and knowledge, central to his work, and how this has influenced not only the study of the Middle East, but how it has influenced the members and activities of the Middle East Studies Association, the largest North American professional association devoted to the study of the region, an organization whose influence sometimes extends beyond its territorial boundaries to other parts of the world.

Presence of the International Committee in the World (Middle East—Arabian Peninsula—Vietnam—Nigeria and Secessionist territory)

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (97) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
International Committee ◽  
General Description ◽  
International Review ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

Each month the International Review gives an account of its current activities. We now think it will be of interest to give a more general description of some of the important actions in which the ICRC is at present engaged in various parts of the world, what these are and also how they are developing. Relief for the victims of the conflict in Nigeria has, in view of the considerable efforts demanded of the ICRC, often been the subject of largely recapitulatory articles. We therefore now reproduce information and figures showing the situation at the end of March 1969.

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