Pomeps Conversations

Sara Pursley talks about her latest book, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about the role of gender and family reform projects in Iraq, two ideas of modernization and economic development, from the 1920s to the first Ba'ath coup in 1963. Pursley said, “For the 1950s, the discourses were really different. They were really focused on economic development as the basis for full political and economic sovereignties. We get different terms, different concepts playing a more important role and also much more of an emphasis on poor families, peasant families, and urban working-class families and how those could be reformed to produce workers and sort of loyal subjects of the regime.” She goes on to explain, “The equal inheritance clause was indeed very controversial and there’s a lot of things written about it in this period, but every other aspect of this law was not a consensus but there was widespread agreement on the rest of the law,

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen talks about his latest book, Qatar and the Gulf Crisis: A Study of Resilience, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In his book, Coates Ulrichsen offers an authoritative study on the Qatari leadership and population’s response to the 2017 economic blockade from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt. Coates Ulrichsen said, “I wanted to look at how Qatar had responded [to the blockade] because the initial assumption, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was that Qatar would fold; they would get their way, there would be a power play. Even though it's never clear what exactly they wanted from it. But Qataris were able to respond very quickly and to rapidly reconfigure a lot of their economic and trading arrangements and also to defeat the crisis politically.” He goes on to explain, “On the 6th of June, the day after the blockades began; President Trump tweeted in apparent support…So from an Emirati Saudi point of view, initially it seemed to be going to plan. What I think th

Noah Salomon talks about his latest book, For the Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst. “So the book really set out to explain something that I felt hadn't been touched on in the literature on Islamic politics and that was to look at the Islamic State project from the question of its sustenance, how is it sustained particularly over a period of almost 30 years as it was in the Sudanese case. We've seen a lot of work on the sort of theoretical possibilities of the Islamic State or the impossibilities of the Islamic State but very little on how it becomes a subject of daily life…What I was puzzled by and curious by is how this political project, particularly if it was characterized as not just a failed state but a weak state, had persisted over this period for so long and despite its many failur

Steven Brooke talks about his latest book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. Through an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. “One of the kind of key things that we often hear about Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood is that one of the reasons why they're popular is that they provide all sorts of things like clinics and schools and things like that. And this kind of makes people support them in elections or mobilize for them or just think kind of positively about these organizations. And so one of the things I wanted to do with the book was basically empirical—I just wanted to kind of see if I could research these things that everyone talks about and everyone seems to think matter, “said Brooke. He explains, “One of the things that really ca

Salwa Ismail talks about her latest book, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book demonstrates how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities and structuring their interactions with the regime and with one another. “The main question [of the book] was really to understand the centrality of violence to the Assad regime and it was also to kind of expand our perspective on violence beyond seeing violence as purely repressive and thinking that it must be functioning; it must do something. I wanted to understand what it did to Syrian society and Syrians as political subject citizens and their understanding of themselves, each other, and the relation to the regime,” said Ismail. When describing the political prison apparatus, she explains, “It was very common to make prisoners eat soiled food too. It was soiled with either urine or vermin or se

Ceren Lord talks about her latest book, Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about how Islamist mobilization in Turkey has been facilitated from within the state by institutions established during early nation-building. “I believe my book offers a corrective to some of the established common wisdoms that look at Islam as politics or religious politics more broadly in terms of seeing it as a reaction to the crisis of a secular state or a grassroots mobilization against a secular state. Instead I focus on how religious politics should be situated as the outcome of a more dynamic struggle within the state itself,” explains Lord. “I started working on the Diyanet back in the 2000s…Most of the literature saw this [the Diyanet] as an apparatus of the secular state and under the AKP the Diyanet came to be seen as the implementer of the AKP ideology. Whereas if you look at…the practices of what the Diyanet has been doing, actua

Omar Dewachi talks about his latest book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book presents the history of healthcare in Iraq, the rise and fall of Iraqi medicine, and the role of healthcare in the making and unmaking of the infrastructure of the state. Dewachi explains, “For four decades the state [of Iraq] invested in training doctors and building better health care institutions. Regardless of the ideology of the ruling parties…there was constant interest in developing the health care infrastructure.” He expands, “The war platform was very important in the 1980s and actually both Iraq and Iran showed…a lot of investment and mobilization of the population to respond to the possible health fallout from the war. So in both countries actually you see cutting down of infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, and the mobilization of the population to actually do public health on a grassroots level.” “What you get in the 1990s [is] a

Is American global hegemony already over? On this week’s podcast, Daniel Nexon talks about his latest book, co-authored with Alexander Cooley, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order, with Marc Lynch. The book explores pathways in which hegemonic orders come apart—short of great power war—and the kinds of processes that are playing out in shaping global politics today. “The big biggest change since the 1990s has been the development of the fact that many more powers not just China and Russia but also Saudi Arabia had the capacity to and have been engaged in efforts to ride some of the kinds of goods we associate with international order; with hedge funds, private and club goods development assistance, that sort of thing. And that these are increasingly in sort of conflict with one another; they're increasingly representing contestation over the shape of order rather than say collusion to maintain a similar kind of broad order, " Nexon argues.  He explains that the United States "had

How did the Persian Gulf states' energy use and policies change with the discovery of oil? That is what Jim Krane tackles in his latest book, Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf, which he discusses on this week's podcast with Marc Lynch. Energy Kingdom traces the history of the Gulf states’ energy use and policies, looking in particular at how energy subsidies have distorted demand. "Nobody ever lifted the hood on their own economies domestically in the Gulf— and looked at just how much energy they use domestically," said Krane. "Energy has been cheap in the Gulf since day one— I really kind of peg the the low prices back to the 1973 oil embargo... But the average household in the UAE used between four and five times  as much electricity as a household in Arizona, where you also have a very hot climate and energy intensive lifestyles." "It was amazing to me that even Arizona pales in comparison with energy demand and in a place like the UAE— and the UAE isn't even the highest.

Thomas Hegghammer speaks about his new book, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad, with Marc Lynch. Hegghammer explains how prominent Palestinian cleric Abdallah Azzam—who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s— came to play such an influential role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. "There were militant Islamist groups in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but they were almost all focused on domestic politics trying to topple their respective regimes. And then— kind of all of a sudden— they turn to the international stage. They start traveling around the world as foreign fighters," said Hegghammer. "Azam is is crucial because he is the main entrepreneur behind the mobilization of  the so-called Arab-Afghans in the 1980s. The Arab-Afghans were basically the foreign fighters in the War in Afghanistan in the 1980s— and Abdullah Azzam was the man who more or less brought them there." "He set up an organization called the Services Bureau to streamline the

On this week's podcast, Mark C. Thompson talks about his new book, Being Young, Male and Saudi: Identity and Politics in a Globalized Kingdom, with Marc Lynch. "The main goal of this book was to give a voice to a very wide variety of young Saudi men across the Kingdom— about how they feel about living in today's contemporary Saudi Arabia, their aspirations and concerns," said Thompson. "Outside of Saudi Arabia, people tend to look at these sort of socio-economic, socio-cultural transformations that are happening in the Kingdom— particularly in the West—  through the prism of what's happening to Saudi women. And they get all the attention, whereas the young men sort of get disregarded, and yet their side of the story is as equally as important— and actually informs us about the current role of Saudi women." Thompson is a Senior Associate Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. He is also an Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Mi

Wolfram Lacher talks about his new book, Libya's Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. "The book really started with the observation that what has marked Libya's political and military landscape since 2011 is localism," said Lacher. "What I very quickly saw when I looked at this phenomenon of local forces was that we're not really talking about city states or tribes that are united in their political position. Actually, at the local level, we have competing political factions and competing military factions within these local constituencies. So you're really talking about an extremely fragmented political scene. And that has been the main obstacle to forming stable coalitions at the central government level— both after the fall of the regime in 2011, and after the second civil war in 2014-2015." "The objective of the book really is to explain this extreme fragmentation and why nobody including Haftar has been able to overcome it...my answer in a n

Yael Zeira talks about her new book The Revolution Within State Institutions and Unarmed Resistance in Palestine with Marc Lynch. Her book examines who engages in resistance activities through an in-depth study of unarmed resistance against Israeli rule in the Palestinian Territories over more than a decade. "The main question that inspired me to write this book is: 'Why do some people participate in risky anti regime resistance while other often pretty similar people abstain?' And this is both a classic question about collective action— and at the same time, a very human question about why ordinary people do extraordinary things." Zeira is the Croft Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Empirical Studies of Conflict Program and the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his wo

On this week's podcast, Jonathan Fulton talks about his book China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies with Marc Lynch. "It's interesting because a lot of the narrative about China-Gulf relations seemed to be stuck in this oil-for-trade narrative— that China is buying a lot of oil and selling a lot of stuff— and that's kind of the extent of the relationship. And from what I've seen here in Abu Dhabi, there's just so much more going on. And it really felt like like there had to be something that looked at it from an IR perspective and gave a fuller picture of the relationships," said Fulton. Fulton explains what and how China's policy towards Gulf monarchies changed in regards to foreign and domestic policies, in the past and now. Fulton is an assistant professor of political science in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he researches China – Middle East relations, Chinese foreign policy, the global strategic implications of the Bel

Simon Mabon speaks about his new book, Houses Built on Sand: Violence, Sectarianism and Revolution in the Middle East, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. "I was trying to understand one way the Arab uprisings played out— in particular, the ways across the region," said Mabon. "What I've done instead is to look at how the relationship between 'rulers and ruled' has evolved across the region across the 20th and 21st centuries. And those particular relationships have created conditions that sometimes allowed for the possibility of dissent and political protest, while at other times prohibited it from taking place, as a consequence of the types of structures, forces and against coercive capacities of particular regimes— which meant that people can take to the streets or not." Mabon is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Richardson Institute at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work

This week's podcast is a conversation with Aaron Y. Zelin who discusses his new book, Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad. In the book, Zelin explains how Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State— even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. Zelin is the Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a visiting research scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University. He is the founder of the website Jihadology.net, a primary source archive of global jihadi materials. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

On this week's POMEPS podcast, May Darwich discusses her new book, Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region, with Marc Lynch. "The book focuses on how threat perceptions for some states led to particular alliance decisions," said Darwich. "It looks at some historical cases ,but also some more recent cases." "In particular, it's looking at how identity and power into plays in shaping threat perception." "So over time the book also gives an idea of how these processes of identity change. They are very they are very slow in that change, but over time we could see that this interaction between material and identity— it's shaping both how the identity is developing over time, but also the alliance choices made based on threats to identity also shapes how actors evolve and how their roles evolve in the region." Darwich is an assistant professor in International Relations of the Middle East in the School of Government and International Affairs (SGIA) at Durham Uni

Launching our new season of the POMEPS Conversations podcast, Narges Bajoghli discusses her book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic.  In this book, Bajoghli provides an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. Dr. Narges Bajoghli is an award-winning anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work focuses on the intersections of power and media. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Shiraz Maher speaks with Marc Lynch about his new book, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea. In the book, he explores the intellectual trajectory of Salafi-Jihadism from its origins in the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the jihadist insurgencies of the 1990s and the 9/11 wars. “I wanted to chart the intellectual migration of this movement with reference to Islamic theology and to try to bring that into the Western discourse to show people here is ISIS or al-Qaeda and here is how they are rationalizing, justifying, or explaining what they're doing,” Maher explains. “I regard all these as being constructions of Islam. And that for me I think is an interesting part of the debate to look at how they're building these ideas and ideology.” Dr. Shiraz Maher is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a member of the War Studies Department at King’s College London. Maher is a recognized expert on jihadist movements. The BBC has described him as “one of the world’s leading

Ariel I. Ahram speaks with Marc Lynch about his new book, Break all the Borders: Separatism and the Reshaping of the Middle East. In Break all the Borders, Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake the borders of the Arab world and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks."I think an assumption about the way the Middle East worked— especially after 2011— everyone talked about state failure, but no one had any idea what the real forces were that were emerging from state failure," says Ahram. "The presumption about the region was that if the states were broken, they would break into a million little pieces. In fact, I found that there were only certain actors and certa