Communism in the Middle East and North Africa

This chapter provides a critical analysis of a selection of Middle Eastern and North African communist parties since the interwar period and the emergence of Marxist-Leninist movements during the Arab Cold War. It focuses on the difficulties the parties faced in the changing national and international settings. Arabs were drawn to communism in the 1930s because of Soviet leadership in global antifascism. But the parties suffered from Stalin’s support for the partition of Palestine in 1947, especially in countries neighboring Israel, and from Soviet support for Arab military regimes during the Cold War. By the mid-1960s, communists no longer had a monopoly on revolutionary ideology as Palestinian-inspired national liberation movements began to vernacularize Marxism-Leninism.

Media as Method in the Age of Revolution

This chapter focuses on the importance of examining media as institutions, industries, practices, and content in explorations of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African history, society, and politics. It argues that understanding media is imperative to the very comprehension of colonial legacies, perennial currents of revolutionary discourse, and the rise of neoliberal authoritarianism. By reviewing the critical role that media and communication play as institutions and practices in the configuration of state-centered power as well as the revolutionary resistance to these, the objective is to contribute to the theoretical understandings of contemporary histories in the region. Furthermore, forthcoming research needs to account for state authoritarianism, corporate monopolization, the mobilization of online deliberation, and the militarization of knowledge production.

Foundations of Religious Reform (Islah) and Cultural Revival (Nahda)

This chapter discusses the foundations of hegemonic reform and cultural revival discourses in the Arabic-speaking lands of the modern Middle East from the perspective of the most recent forays in scholarly fields such as Islamic and Ottoman studies. Teasing out periodization and geographies, it grounds the thought and practice of canonical and less canonical actors in the historical public sphere in which they operated, questioning the relationship between the Nahda and the Tanzimat, the Nahda and eighteenth-century revivalism, the Nahda and the seventeenth-century Arab-Islamic florescence, as well as the special status accorded “Islamic” reform within the Nahda. Finally, it probes the larger questions of modernity, subjectivity, and citizenship between the onset of the protectorates and the termination of the mandates, as these became encrypted within the major ideologies (pan-Islam, pan-Arabism, territorial nationalisms) and enacted through the most significant technologies mobilized by the actors (the press, the associations, the parties, and the schools).

Constitutional Revolutions and State Formations in Comparison

The history of both modern Turkey and modern Iran have often been told through their founding figures, Atatürk and Reza Shah, whose state-building projects are often assumed to have been similar. This chapter compares the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire of 1908 with the Constitutional Revolution in Iran in 1906 to point to both similarities and differences in the trajectories of these two countries in the early twentieth century. Both revolutions, it is argued, were foundational moments for the political development and processes of each country and are key to understanding the context in which Atatürk and Reza Shah emerged.

After Gaddafi

The course of the 2011 Libyan revolution, international intervention, and the regime’s application of armed force created new forms of sub-state affiliation and mobilization. International and regional intervention has exacerbated Libya’s chaos and deepened its fault lines. The civil war in 2014 was the culmination of these fissures and international pressures but conflicts since then by the myriad armed groups have become increasingly predatory—a scramble for the country’s oil wealth and the capture of state institutions. Libya’s conflicts are directly tied to the pathologies of the rentier oil state under Gaddafi and the failure of post-2011 distributive policies, along with endemic corruption and cronyism. Meanwhile, Western engagement is focused on parochial aims such as counterterrorism and stemming irregular migration. For the foreseeable future, Libya is likely to suffer from truncated sovereignty, a fractured national identity, regional meddling, simmering armed conflict, and hyper-localized politics.

The Crisis of Sovereignty, Ruptured Domination, and the Kurdish Quest for Democratic Self-Government in Syria

Despite the consensus that both the political crisis in Syria and the emergence of the Kurdish autonomous region have serious implications for the viability of the nation-state in Syria, no attempt has been made to provide a theoretical explanation worthy of the name. Informed discussions of the crisis and its likely outcomes often resort to political history in order to trace the roots of a chronic crisis of legitimacy, identified as the primary cause of the current crisis. Syria, this chapter argues, is gripped by a crisis of sovereignty, signified by a rupture in the structure of domination necessary to ensure the reproduction of state power and the working of the apparatuses created to sustain its effective exercise and application. The rupture runs deep in the tissue of sovereign power, ripping open its legal façade and going down to its violent core. It lays bare the founding act of the state, an act of pure violence which is also the moment of the birth of the stateless, the suppressed other of the sovereign. In this sense, therefore, the rupture is the intersection of crisis of sovereignty and the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy; they are interrelated, historically and logically.

Reliving Tragedies as Historical Reawakenings

Since the early twentieth century, Iranians have lived through several critical moments with significant socioeconomic and religiopolitical consequences for the nation and beyond. These include, though not limited to, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11); Oil Nationalization Movement (1952–53) led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh; 1979 Revolution (1978–79); and 2009 post-presidential election uprisings—the so-called Green Movement, not to mention the recent protests in severaltowns and cities against economic disparity and corruption (late Dec. 2017 and early Jan. 2017–2018). Never merely about the internal conditions, these movements have always been linked with and responded to the interference of, or anxieties about the role of, foreign powers. This chapter elucidates how Iranians’ sense of indignity at living under tyranny, their concern about national sovereignty, socioeconomic disparity, and the lack of political voice have motivated their resistance. The mytho-historical referent of Karbala, intertwined with modern liberal discourses, nationalist sentiments, and the leftist notion of social justice have simultaneously fueled these movements and led to internal conflicts. Nevertheless, the dreams of a better tomorrow or the desire for freedom from tyranny linger on, anticipating new awakenings.

Sextarianism

Lebanese statecraft and sovereignty emerge from the management of sectarian difference and sexual difference; two mutually constitutive modes of political difference. This chapter develops an analytic for the study of Lebanese statecraft that is situated at the intersections between sect and sex, “sextarianism.” Sextarianism allows the study of the Lebanese state without separating or privileging sectarian difference from sexual difference, an analytic approach that is grounded in the ways that the state actually regulates and produces sexual and sectarian difference (what we might call sextarian difference). As a technology of biopolitical power, sextarianism makes possible the categories of citizenship, family, sex, and sect.

The “New Turkey” At Home and Abroad

This chapter examines the reversal of Turkey’s trajectory over the last fifteen years. It addresses the domestic transformation of Turkey through constitutional reforms, shifting civil–military relations, economic growth, corruption, ethnic conflict, and the relationship between religion and state. Examining these issues helps to explain why Turkish politics has become more polarized, and how this has been manipulated by the governing party to consolidate a majoritarian system and to crack down on dissent. The chapter then traces changes in Turkey’s foreign policy as it moves away from prioritizing relations with Washington and Brussels and seeks to forge a more multifaceted set of regional policies. This has failed for a number of reasons, including the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war. Instead, the government has embraced a “Eurasianist” turn aligning Turkey with authoritarian regimes in the Caucasus and the Arabian Gulf, in keeping with the country’s increasingly repressive domestic politics.

Contemporary Israel/Palestine

This chapter provides an intellectual and political guide to further our understanding of the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict and how power, violence, exclusion, and the law shape its various transformations and contemporary realities. Rather than fully covering the assemblage of historical and current policies and practices that make up the conflict, this chapter outlines major theoretical and legal tenets and political starting-points that any serious and honest scholar or observer of Israel/Palestine might consider. Placing together an emphasis on Jewish ethnic privilege, demographic dominance, and a geographic continuity of exclusion, this chapter examines contemporary Israel/Palestine as a Zionist incorporation regime. Here relations and categories of inclusion and exclusion are shaped by a settler-colonial Zionist ideology that work in conjunction, intersect, and fuel one another. Together, they shape the racialized contours of a unitary Zionist incorporation regime that exposes all Palestinian Arabs, as a non-Jewish indigenous population, to a settler-colonial exclusion regardless of their particular legal and political status.