Pomeps Conversations

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

Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili talk about their new book, Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors. "The inspiration for the book goes back to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon— or Israel and Hezbollah," said Peralman. "Boaz and I both had postdoc fellowships at Harvard and we met in the aftermath of that... We're both quite intrigued by one aspect of that war, which was Israel's targeting of Lebanon as a state. Why would Israel target a weak host state— and demand it to stop non-state actors?" "We find is that in earlier years [of this policy], it's basically a trial and error kind of process. Israel has tried many different things— defensive measures, targeting civilians, etc.— and among them was what we call 'trial coercion.' So trying to target the forces of the state the military or police of the state and using that as a way to coerce the state to try to rein in the non-state actors. And when we get to the 1990s, that's where we see a shift where Israel basically

Ziya Meral speaks with Marc Lynch about his latest book, How Violence Shapes Religion: Belief and Conflict in the Middle East and Africa. "I really wanted to demystify the conversation on religion and violence," said Meral. "I wanted to highlight another direction of this discussion— which is how violence leads to religion, how violence alters religions, and impacts them— and why is it that religions are so present in violent conflicts that they don't necessarily triggered themselves." Meral is a British and Turkish researcher, and is a senior resident fellow at the UK Army's Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research based at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is also the Director of the Centre on Religion and Global Affairs, based in London and Beirut. 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 episode of the POMEPS Conversation Podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on violent Islamism. Hegghammer talks about current status of the Islamic State (ISIS), as well as future of violent extremism. "The way I see the the the Islamic State terrorism campaign in Europe in 2015, 2016, and 2017 happened because there was a new generation of leaders in place who hadn't quite realized or internalized the repercussions of [their] strategy," Hegghammer says. "But I think that now— even in the Islamic State family— there is a growing realization that if you want to stay alive, or if you want to keep some kind of operation locally, you want to be careful about what you what you do. So I suspect that at least the medium-term effect of this will be a certain type of some kind of taming of the Islamic State animal." Hegghammer is currently a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and adjunct professor of political science at the University of

On this week's podcast, Jessie Moritz discusses her research on the Rentier States. Moritz is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, Princeton University. She has conducted interviews with over 150 citizens of Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, including members of royal families, ministers, elected and appointed representatives, development experts, entrepreneurs, prominent leaders in civil society, and youth activists involved in protests since 2011. Her current research focuses on the political economy of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular focus on post-2014 economic reform programs and their impact on state-society relations. We have to understand that before we get to oil and gas and democratization, we have to understand oil and gas and lack of mobilization- whether that's through the absence of taxation or whether that's through cooptation or the funding of a repressive apparatus.

Jason Brownlee researches and teaches about authoritarianism and political emancipation. He is the author of Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization(Cambridge University Press, 2007), Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and (with Tarek Masoud and Andrew Reynolds) The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform(Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as articles in American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and other scholarly journals. Professor Brownlee is currently studying intersections of the U.S. political economy and Middle Eastern conflicts. "While I think that domestic movements for promoting foreign policy change are essential and can be highly influential at particular points, for example eventually bringing the United States around to join the international consensus against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, I think for a long term behavioral change away from interventionism we w