Pomeps Conversations

Ahmed Khanani of Earlham College talks about his latest book, All Politics are God’s Politics: Moroccan Islamism and the Sacralization of Democracy, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book enables readers to understand and appreciate the significance of dimuqrāṭiyya [democracy] as a concept alongside new prospects for Islam and democracy in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (Starts at 22:49). Kaoutar Ghilani of Oxford University speaks about her new article, "The legitimate’ after the uprisings: justice, equity, and language politics in Morocco," published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. (Starts at 0:56). Chantal Berman of Georgetown University discusses her new article, "Policing the Organizational Threat in Morocco: Protest and Public Violence in Liberal Autocracies," published in the American Journal of Political Science. (Starts at 11:41). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page.

Aaron Rock-Singer of University of Wisconsin-Madison talks about his latest book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book shows how Islamic activists and institutions across the political spectrum reshaped daily practices [in Egypt] in an effort to persuade followers to adopt novel models of religiosity. (Starts at 27:42). Bassel Salloukh of Lebanese-American University speaks about his new special issue article, "Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World: A Critical Stocktaking," published in the Journal of Studies of in Ethnicity and Nationalism. (Starts at 1:13). Carolyn Barnett, graduate student at Princeton University, and Steve Monroe of Yale-NUS College discuss their new piece (co-authored with Amaney Jamal of Princeton University), "Earned Income and Women’s Segmented Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Jordan," published in the American Journal of Political Science. You can also read their piece on Remote work and women’s e

Alex Thurston of the University of Cincinnati talks about his latest book, Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book studies cases of jihadist movements in North Africa and the Sahel, examining them from the inside, uncovering their activities and internal struggles over the past three decades. (Starts at 19:50). Michael Robbins, Director of the Arab Barometer, introduces the Arab Barometer and discusses recent polling work on themes including the normalization of Arab states with Israel, and the effects of COVID-19. (Starts at 1:14). Christiana Parreira of Stanford University discusses her recent article, "Power politics: Armed non-state actors and the capture of public electricity in post-invasion Baghdad," published in the Journal of Peace Research. (Starts at 10:10).

Kelsey Norman of Rice University talks about her latest book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book proposes the concept of 'strategic indifference', where states [such as Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey] proclaim to be indifferent toward migrants and refugees, thereby inviting international organizations and local NGOs to step in and provide services on the state's behalf. (Starts at 28:27). Gail Buttorff of University of Houston speaks about her new report, "COVID-19 Pandemic Compounds Challenges Facing MENA Research," (co-authored with Nermin Allam of Rutgers University and Marwa Shalaby of University of Wisconsin-Madison) published in the American Political Science Association Fall 2020 MENA Politics Newsletter. You can also read their pieces: "A Survey Reveals How the Pandemic Has Hurt MENA Research" and "Gender, COVID and Faculty Service." (Starts at 1:40). Samer Abboud of Villanova University discusses his

Aaron Jakes talks about his latest book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. Jakes explains, “In the broadest sense, the book, it is a history of the period of British rule in Egypt after the occupation of 1882. And it makes three broad arguments: first, that this particular form of colonial rule was organized around the discourse that I call colonial economist…the second major argument of the book is that under these conditions, Egypt became a crucial laboratory and target for financial investment in the worldwide financial expansion that was characteristic of global capitalism at the end of the 19th century. And finally, I'm sort of interested in the interplay between the discursive claims of the British regime and these dramatic transformations

Joas Wagemakers talks about his new book, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history and complex relationship with Jordan, its parliament and society. “In Jordan [the Muslim Brotherhood] basically had Royal support from the very start, and the reason for that was that the King did not really have a lot of authority within the country of Transjordan, as it was still called in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, and sought sources of authority that would help him gain the status of King or ruler in this new nation” explains Wagemakers. Wagemakers says, “After 1989, when decisions had to be made about: are we going to participate in elections, are we going to participate in the government if the government asked us to, are we going to be responsible for the decisions that we make. [The Muslim Brotherhood] really had to make political decisions. The existing divisions within the Muslim Brotherhood became clearer and clearer.” “The

Sherine Hafez talks about her latest book, Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In her book, she demonstrates how women were a central part of the revolutionary process of the Arab Spring; not only protesting in the streets of Cairo, but also demanding democracy, social justice, and renegotiation of a variety of sociocultural structures that repressed and disciplined them. Hafez explains, “I just wanted to make sure that the contributions of women in the Midan during the uprisings, and specifically in Egypt, were documented so that…the activism cannot be written off as just part of the revolution…And I wanted so much to make sure that this is a record that can be read by future young activists of all genders, so that they can look back and know that there is a record of their contributions to politics in the Middle East.” Hafez goes on, “When I decided to write the book, the revolution was in its hey-day…The revolutionaries felt that things c

Elizabeth Nugent talks about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores how polarization and repression led to different political outcomes in Tunisia and Egypt. Nugent explains, “When I started my fieldwork in Tunisia, it was clear to me again coming from Egypt with that kind of as my baseline how differently people spoke about each other and so the more I dug in the more that repression - the way in which the Ben Ali regime and the Mubarak regime repressed these different opposition groups - was very key for why these two different places ended up very differently polarized.” “It’s possible that as repression has come to touch a number of different groups in Egypt in the current moment it’s softening some of these identity politics that have been problematic in the past,” says Nugent. Nugent says, “What I find is that there are higher levels of both affective and preference polarization, here meaning negative a

Anne Marie Baylouny talks about her latest book, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explains how the recent influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon has stimulated domestic political action against these countries' governments. Baylouny explains, “So usually these governments use all kinds of groups…to blame for their faults. Oh we can't provide this. We have water shortage because of the Iraqis. This problem with the government is because of another group and they blame them for all their lack of state capacity. So here you have an overwhelming number of Syrians over a quarter of Lebanon's population and at least 10 percent of Jordan's, probably their first and second in the world for refugees per capita. And they're foreigners and a lot of them are poor and they came in in masses…So you have they have all the elements that you would expect states to be able to successfully deflect blame from themselve

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl talks about his latest book, Quagmire in Civil War, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. His book explains he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices and draws upon field research on Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, structured comparisons with civil wars in Chad and Yemen, and rigorous statistical analyses of all civil wars worldwide fought between 1944 and 2006. Schulhofer-Wohl explains, “I was very interested in digging into an idea of how it was that the groups that are fighting in civil wars can become trapped in a war…There are some wars in which it looks like for whatever reason the armed groups that are fighting in them are unable to win the war. They're unable to negotiate to make a settlement and the war just drags on. But there's something about that that's different from just a war that lasts for a very long time.” He goes on to say, “The book makes the point that we kind of have a default view of entrapment and c

Hiba Bou Akar talks about her latest book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Bou Akar explains, “So I start looking at the planning and how these residential complexes ended up mushrooming in an agricultural area but also next to inductees and eventually like a whole world starts opening to me about how… war displacement has shaped the housing market. There are political organizations that are fighting over territory after the war. And how planning is a tool in that conflict. It would sometimes be of negotiation and sometimes of contestation.” She goes on to say, “So the [idea of], For The War Yet to Come ends up being like this expectation of war that is either going to be like an Arab-Israeli war…or sectarian war, a regional war or whatever; that ends up shaping

Aili Tripp talks about her latest book, Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women’s Rights, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores why autocratic leaders in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria embraced more legal reforms of women’s rights than their Middle Eastern counterparts, and how women’s rights were used to advance the political goals of these authoritarian regimes. Tripp explains, “I was interested in the fact that you have this growing divergence within the MENA region itself in terms of the adoption of women’s rights, yet people keep talking about the region as one monolith when it came to women’s rights. “The fact that women’s rights are such a central theme in north African politics. I mean nothing happens without the issue of women’s rights coming to the floor somehow as we saw at the time of independence in Algeria, as we saw after the Arab Spring in Tunisia with the debates over the constitution in 2011,” notes Tripp. Tripp says, “Why are autocrats adopting women’s rig

Amr Adly talks about his latest book, Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores why market-based economic development failed to meet expectations in Egypt. “The main argument is that we have three business systems in Egypt in reference to rules formal as well as informal and mixes of the two, according to which different business establishments have been operating. And the crucial thing really is how their access to physical and financial capital has been regulated.” “The main point here is that the vast majority of private establishments, the ones that are strictly owned by private individuals, have suffered from a chronic under structuring under capitalization when it comes to access to back credit given of course the structure of the financial system in Egypt, which is very much bank-based, as well as access to land.” "One of the problems here is that you have a banking system in Egypt that is still very much control

Pascal Menoret talks about his latest book, Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In the book, he tells the stories of the people actively countering the Saudi state and highlights how people can organize and protest even amid increasingly intense police repression. Menoret explains, “Basically what happens in the suburbs is that it's a fixed place where people could congregate and create mass movements by the presence or the co presence of their bodies. On the street what you have is moving entities-moving devices-moving tools, automobiles that can be used to reconstitute movements to protest sometimes and to create that effect of mass that might change the political dynamic in the country.” “I was interested in looking at…what activists call Islamic action…in everyday spaces. And these big figures indeed become parts of much more grounded conversations about the meaning of, for instance, what it means to read books…what it means to read novels f

Nadav Shelef talks about his latest book, Homelands: Shifting Borders and Territorial Disputes, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the idea of homelands and nationalism and articulates an analogous theory for how and why the places that people think of as their homelands stop being part of their homeland around the world. Shelef explains, “One of the things that I did was to look at how domestic media around the world talked about territory that they had lost. And when you do that, you can actually see territory drop from the discourse in particular cases. In Pakistan, they stopped talking about East Pakistan very, very quickly and they switched the terminology and started talking about Bangladesh in ways that are very difficult to imagine Palestinians stop talking about Jaffa.” “For these changes to spread and become real they need to be reinforced politically. And what we see - in fact, what we see going on right now among Palestinians - is something of a withdrawal from the idea of

Laleh Khalili talks about her latest book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant for the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.   Khalili explains, “Whenever you look at the list of the Journal of Commerce’s top 10 container ports in the world, the only port that is not either in East Asia or Southeast Asia in that top 10 list is Dubai, Jebel Ali in Dubai. And to me, that was also really interesting. Why is it that Jebel Ali, which does not have a very large hinterland, which is a city-state, why would it end up being such a significant port for container transport?” Khalili continues, “What is interesting is that there is very little actually about the role of trade and the transformation of the peninsula beyond the trade in oil once oil becomes the commodity that starts defining the political economy of these countries.” “I wanted to zoom out to a more

Marc Lynch speaks with Marwa Shalaby of Rice University about the status of women in politics in the Middle East.

Catherine Herrold talks about her latest book, Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book uncovers the strategies that Egyptian NGOs have used to advance the aims of the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “What the book argues is that, in fact, many development NGOs and local grant making foundations did promote democracy. But they did so in ways that went unrecognized by the Western democracy promotion establishment and, far more importantly, by successive ruling regimes in Egypt. And they did so, number one, by masking their democracy promotion work...And number two, instead of focusing on the procedural form of democracy, they sought to build substantive democracy through participation, free expression, and rights claiming at grassroots levels,” explains Herrold. She goes on to say, “these development NGO and foundations really focused on the grassroots and they created spaces for collective action for discussion, f

Fanar Haddad talks about his latest book, Understanding ‘Sectarianism’: Sunni-Shi’a Relations in the Modern Arab World, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification, but as a multi-layered concept. Haddad said, “One of the problems with how sectarianism, the phrase, is approached is that it’s almost always is presented as meaning just one thing thereby condensing what is inescapably a multifaceted subject into some mono-dimensional or mono-colored aspect. And so if we are going to take sectarian identity we need to avoid making the same mistake.” “What I propose in the book is that sectarian identity operates on four dimensions simultaneously, on four interlinked dimensions. And these are the doctrinal dimension, the subnational, so that’s the dynamics within a single nation-state. Thirdly, at the level of the nation-state, so in terms of how sectarian identity interacts with nationalism and national identity, and finally on a t

Samuel Helfont talks about his latest book, Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book investigates religion and politics in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as well as the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. Helfont said, “I found that there was proliferation of religious symbols and religious rhetoric in Iraq, especially in the 1990s, but when you sort of dug down you see that all of this was promoted and created by the regime. Not as a way to embrace Islamism but as a way to combat it.” “The assumption on the US part was that the Iraqis really didn’t have control, which I find to be just a huge mistake on behalf of people planning the war in 2003. And they go in thinking that the regime, when it crumbles, isn’t going to have much effect on Iraqi society or the religious landscape to the sense that they thought about it because they didn’t think the regime rea