POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

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 rights legislation and making constitutional provisions and promoting women as leaders? In a nutshell, my argument has to do with some of the strategic interaction that goes on between the ruling parties, which in the case of Tunisia and Morocco for the time period I’m looking at are Islamist parties. Between the regime and these Islamist parties and the various Islamist movements in these countries and the interaction with women’s movements this interaction between these various actors has resulted in an unprecedented advancement in women’s rights.” Aili Mari Tripp is Wangari Maathai Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Tripp’s research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, women and peacebuilding, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. Her current research involves a comparative study of women and legal reform in North Africa. 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.

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 controlled by the state. You have very large state-owned banks that still hold up something between one-third and forty percent of the total assets of the banking system. Despite rounds of privatization and liberalization and even without this crucial factor of the direct state ownership of the big banks, you have state regulation that is both formal as well as informal. All of these networks that have historically tied state-owned enterprises and then later on private businesses that are like crony businessmen that have been related to the successive ruling regimes in Egypt, all of these have created a regulatory environment that made it extremely hard for those who lack either initial capital or political and social capital.  Amr Adly is an assistant professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. He has also worked as a project manager at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Adly received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. He is also the author of State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). 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.

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 for young activists who gather in a high school and some of whom are interested in reading Harry Potter. That's a great challenge because they decide that you know first of all reading is a training and it's trains you to use the language to think, to speak, but it's also a way for you to get exposed to other ways to look at the world and therefore you can only make your own you know self-construction as a reader but also as an activist stronger; you become more articulate,” he explains. Menoret goes on to say, “Muslim Brothers will tend to use many more spaces to organize and to create conversations and to create numbers and to create an atmosphere in which you can actually talk about social issues. You can talk about intellectual issues, you can talk about political issues, they will use sports to do that, they would use leisure spaces…they will use the suburbs actually. They will really have a whole thinking about what it means to be living in the suburbs and to organize in suburban environments whereas the Salafis…tend to be much closer to the religious sciences right into a space that is much more exclusive in many ways…” Pascal Menoret is the Renee and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Saudi Enigma: A History (2005) and Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (2014), Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge University Press 2014), Arabia, from the Incense Road to the Oil Era (Gallimard 2010, in French), and The Saudi Enigma: A History (Zed Books 2005). An ethnographer and historian, he conducted four years of fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and has also lived in France, Yemen, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Paris 1 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Harvard University. 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.

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 but the acceptance of partition and the redefinition of the territory in which Palestinians can achieve their national aspirations because it’s not working. And so to the extent that ideas consistent with partition lose politically, we’re not going to see them spread and we’re going to see other kinds of solutions,” says Shelef. Shelef says, “I think we have two main lessons. One is that homelands matter. That is simply claiming or talking about a piece of territory as part of the homeland greatly increases the likelihood of international conflict between neighbors that would share that territory… The second is that homelands can change. Even though they matter they are a variable and as a variable, they can vary over time. And that implies that the impact that they have or that their loss has on conflict could also vary. Once you no longer consider a territory part of the homeland, you should see a reduction in conflict over that territory.” Nadav Shelef is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Israel Studies and Professor of Political Science. Professor Shelef teaches and studies nationalism, religion and politics, Israeli politics and society, and middle east politics. His current projects focus on understanding how homelands change and the conditions under which religious parties moderate their positions. 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.

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 regional Indian ocean and global trade. But I also wanted to zoom in and focus on the kind of stories that emerge in the context of these forms of global trade and to locate Arabian Peninsula not as some sort of hermetically sealed exceptional kind of object of study but rather as one node in the large vast network of global trade and developing and transforming constantly as this kind of nodes,” says Khalili. Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies  (Stanford 2013). 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.

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, for debate, for problem solving…They created spaces for free expression through arts and culture and other means in which citizens could come together and express their views for the future of Egypt. And they coached grassroots communities on their basic human rights as citizens and on claiming those rights from local government officials...” Herrold argues, “There are three to four primary weaknesses of U.S. democracy assistance. Number one, it focuses almost exclusively on a procedural form of democracy. It seeks to reform national political institutions often in the shape of U.S. democratic institutions which are not necessarily the types of institutions that…might be best in the target country. Number two, it is expressly political. So it's separate from aid for socioeconomic development or humanitarian assistance. [Number three], it's also highly technical. Democracy aid produces outputs such as reports trainings et cetera that often fail to result in the desired outcome of democracy…And finally it tends to be elite…It tends to circulate in a relatively elite militia of highly trained, highly educated professionals…” Catherine Herrold is an Assistant Professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a Faculty Affiliate of the Indiana University Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the American University in Cairo (Egypt) and Birzeit University (Palestine). She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Qatar. 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.

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 transnational level, as well. And by dissecting it in that way, we can start better identifying what aspect of sectarian identity we’re actually concerned with or is actually relevant when people use that catchall phrase sectarianism,” Haddad said. Haddad explains, “Blindness is not necessarily neutrality because unless you remedy the underlying structural imbalances, blindness becomes a way of perpetuating and enforcing these imbalances… Were one to raise the issue of structural sectarian discrimination, one will be accused of being sectarian or being guilty of sectarianism. So whether it’s in Bahrain or Syria or in Iraq today or previously before 2003, it’s almost criminalized to lobby or raise awareness of structural sectarian discrimination that disproportionally affects one sectarian identity. And the parallel I draw is, ‘Would we ever think of calling the NAACP a racist organization for lobbying for the rights of a minority?’” Fanar Haddad is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, Washington D.C. He has lectured in modern Middle Eastern politics at the University of Exeter, at Queen Mary, University of London and at the National University of Singapore. 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.

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 really had control. What you find is that the regime had a very strict control," said Helfont. Helfont explained, “[Saddam Hussein] thinks that religion could be an important instrument for him and his regime, but he has a problem which is that he doesn’t control the religious landscape. So you can’t get into the public and start saying to people ‘Hey be a good Muslim’… So you see Saddam and his regime, the Ba’thist regime, begin to try to shape the religious landscape, try to eliminate people they’d see as problematic, try to replace them with people that they think are more loyal to the regime or at least will follow the rules.” Samuel Helfont is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His research focuses on international history and politics in the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Iraq Wars. 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.

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, especially among state authorities, feminists, communist, Ba'athists, Arab nationalists, Sunni religious authorities…. The exception was the Shia religious clerics who had a broader critique of the law.” "The differences in the public discourse kind of get submerged into the social reform project which all of the parties, you know, the Ba’athist, the communists, the other Arab nationalist party which was the independence Party, the National Democratic Party, those were the four main political parties that were sort of supporting the coup in the begging. They all, in spite of all their differences, [had] really strong consensus about the need for social reform, the need to create a new kind of Iraqi who would be the agent of economic development. And so really what I want to get at here is that consensus is partly what enabled the depoliticization of the Iraqi public sphere that many historians, not just me, have seen as kind of laying the groundwork for the 1963 coup,” said Pursley.  Sara Pursley is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Pursley works on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab Middle East, mainly Iraq. She has explored questions related to economic development and modernization theory, histories of psychology and pedagogy, gender and sexuality, childhood and youth, revolution and decolonization, Islamic and secular family law, land settlement projects, and the transition from British to American empire. 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.