POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

On this week’s podcast, Frederic Wehrey talks about his new book, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) on the aftermath of the 2011 revolution in Libya. Wehrey interviews the key actors in Libya and paints vivid portraits of lives upended by a country in turmoil: the once-hopeful activists murdered or exiled, revolutionaries transformed into militia bosses or jihadist recruits, an aging general who promises salvation from the chaos in exchange for a return to the old authoritarianism. "Who owns the post conflict recovery? Because the mantra in U.S. was that Libyans are owning this. Well Libyans weren't equipped to own this because of Qaddafi's rule. Or perhaps less regional interference you know could have forestalled a collapse," says Wehrey. "But there again there's the question of U.S. power. How much authority do we have over these allies that are acting in contravention of our interests?" Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He specializes in post-conflict transitions, armed groups, and identity politics, with a focus on Libya, North Africa, and the Gulf. "The U.N. is wrestling with the question of how do you do the post conflict reconstruction when you don't have a stabilization force on the ground [in Libya]. That was a missing component that should have been part of the mix.  So it's this question where you don't want a complete Iraq type scenario- where you have this occupation and militarization and heavy handed- but then the over-learning that lesson where you've got this complete vacuum is going too far in the other direction."

On this week's podcast, Julie Chernov Hwang talks about her new book, Why Terrorists Quit: The Disengagement of Indonesian Jihadists, (Cornell Press, 2018) on the factors  that convince jihadists to move away from the extremist ideologies of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Mujahidin KOMPAK. Over the course of six years Chernov Hwang conducted more than one hundred interviews with current and former leaders and followers of radical Islamist groups in Indonesia to write this book. "The linchpin of successful disengagement, reintegration. is the establishment of an alternative social network of friends, mentors, and supportive family members. Then second and complementary to that are priority shifts that refocus the extremist away from movement- towards family, towards furthering one's education, towards finding gainful employment to sustain life," says Chernov Hwang. "And so these two factors taken together can help the extremists develop a post Jihad identity, possibly post group identity. And moreover they can function as a counterweight to the pull of the movement, the friends, and the incentives for reengagement too." Julie Chernov Hwang is an associate professor of political science and international relations in the Center for People, Politics and Markets at Goucher College. She was a 2012 Luce South East Asia Fellow at the East West Center and currently serves as Managing Editor of Asian Security.

On this week's podcast, Calvert W. Jones discusses her new book, Bedouins into Bourgeois: Remaking Citizens for Globalization, (Cambridge University Press, 2017) on the state-led social engineering campaign in the United Arab Emirates. "In the UAE, the leaders clearly don't want democratic citizens. And neither do leaders in Singapore, or leaders in China, or leaders in a lot of countries today," says Jones. "They don't want citizens making these democratic demands, but they do want citizens who are going to be contributing economically, and sometimes they want  liberal citizens who are more open minded, more tolerant, more socially or  have a higher civic consciousness. But they just don't want those kinds of political demands. And so that is a tricky, tricky challenge that they're dealing with in the UAE." Calvert W. Jones is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Government & Politics. Her current research examines new approaches to citizen-building in the Middle East, with an emphasis on goals, mechanisms, and outcomes in state-led social engineering efforts.

On this week's podcast, Asef Bayat talks about his new book, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, (Stanford University Press, 2017) a comparative analysis on the 2011 revolutions and those of the 1970s. "These [2011] revolutions happened at a time when the very idea of revolution, the very concept of revolution had dissipated," says Bayat. "The activists were not thinking in terms of revolution in the way that the activists in the 1970s or earlier during the Cold War had been thinking about revolution. They were reading about revolutions, about the experiences, having groups, and so forth." Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, 2009, 2013) and Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007). "In the case of say Iran, women who have been forced to wear hijab- some do who voluntarily wear hijab, but many others do not want to wear hijab- pull back their hijabs back, and back, and back.  And they do it not necessarily as a movement collectively but rather they do it in their everyday life, individually while they are on the street or on a bus. And then you do it. She's doing it, he's doing it, and many others are doing it. And you're also noticing each other doing it. There is what is called a passive network among these people. It is a collective action which is somewhat encroaching into the law of this state or norms. By doing so the hope is to create alternative norms in society."

On today's podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Gershon Shafir about his latest book, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict. Shafir is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. "In many ways, the occupation is all about is a military control that allows Israel to deploy various [methods] of control that no civilian government could could contemplate. This affects not only Palestinians who engage in hostile activities against Israel— or even suspect of engaging activities— but also their families, friends, and the rest of the Palestinian population." "I would say that today Israel itself is being occupied by the occupation." Shafir says, "Not only the West Bank, but the Israeli mind is being colonized."

On this week's podcast, Joas Wagemakers talks about his new book, Salafism in Jordan: Political Islam in a Quietist Community, on the quietist ideology that characterizes many Salafi movements. "Salafism is obviously in the news all the time. It's in the news in Western European countries, for example, as a threat usually as connected to terrorism, but it's also important because it has to do with the relation between religion and non-religious people: what role does religion play in society?" says Wagemakers. "For that reason the study of Salafism in general in important. With regard to the Middle East, we usually hear about Salafism in Egypt, sometimes in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, but not so much Jordan." Joas Wagemakers is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Utrecht University. His research focuses on Salafism and Islamism. His publications include A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Salafism: Utopian Ideals in a Stubborn Reality (Parthenon, 2014 (in Dutch); with Martijn de Koning and Carmen Becker) and Salafism in Jordan: Political Islam in a Quietist Community (Cambridge University Press, 2016). "I remember interviewing people in 2013 who could sit in the same room, and one person said 'I support the Islamic State'. Another said 'I support Al Qaeda' and another saying 'I support all' and they could still be friends. But the polarization and the partisanship in this issue created a situation in which that sort of thing was no longer possible. The enmity between these different groups ensured that they grew apart. And you're either a supporter of the Islamic State or al Qaeda. Never the two shall meet."

On this week's podcast, Quinn Mecham talks about his new book, Institutional Origins of Islamist Political Mobilization, on the politicization of Islam. "So often in the Arab world we think about jihadi networks; we think about sometimes Islamist movements particularly the Muslim Brotherhood that have a social component to them, but also are involved street protests in many places in the Islamic world," says Mecham. "While actually it's more common to see militias— for example, Taliban or al Shabaab in Somalia." Quinn Mecham is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Coordinator for Middle East Studies at Brigham Young University. He was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University, and was a Franklin Fellow in Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. His primary research focuses on Islamic movements and the strategies and behavior of Islamist political parties. "As different Islamist movements observe Islamic moves in other countries, they are influenced by— and we do see clear trends over time that there is a spread across countries over time. One of the the broader trends in the book is that the big Islamist protest movements like the Iranian revolution and the post-election Algerian protests— and then sighting these kinds of things have diminished over time. Until we get to some of the core civil wars in the last few years. But the range of countries that are experiencing Islamists either voting or using violent through things has greatly expanded."

On this week's podcast, Fatima El-Issawi talks about her new book, Arab National Media and Political Change on the role of traditional media and journalists in the Arab spring. "As an academic and former journalist, I was intrigued by the question of what would be the interplay between these movements and the traditional media, talking here about radio, TV, and print news online," says El-Issawi. "My major question was to try to dissect and to understand the interplay between this movement and traditional media, and how journalists could impact this process whether they would be encouraging change or encouraging and supporting the status quo." El-Iwassi is a Senior Lecturer in the Journalism Department at the University of Essex. She has covered conflicts, wars, and crises in Lebanon, Post-Saddam Iraq, and Jordan, for recognized international media such as Agence France Presse (AFP) and the BBC World Service. "Journalists in Egypt told me if you want today to do your job as journalists, you will be imprisoned because you cannot. You cannot report on the police.You cannot report on the security. You cannot report on topics that could be construed as anti-Islamic for example. So the level of restriction is very high, and most of the time, reforms were cosmetic because they were also negated by other sets of laws, but most importantly the new set of a anti-terror laws are again limiting the storytelling tools of the official narrative."

On this week's podcast, Elisabeth Kendall speaks about her research on poetry by militant jihadists, particularly in Yemen. "There was so much poetry being produced by militant jihadist movements— and nobody was looking at it," says Kendall. "I found it initially online, but I didn't know that the online magazines as I found were also being passed around in hard copy on the ground. And I could tell that Yemen was a real hot spot for this, possibly because being the birth place essentially of Arabic poetry. It still was an oral culture, particularly in a desert environment. So I thought I'd go there and find out what was what was actually happening and how much still resonated on the ground." Kendall is a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Middle East Peace and Security Initiative and the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. "I sneaked in a little question about poetry into [a survey of eastern Yemen in 2012-2013] where I simply asked, 'How important is poetry in your daily life?' And over 2000 tribesmen and tribeswomen, 74 percent said either 'important' or 'very important,' on a scale you know six different possible answers. And that was their daily lives. So that was really fascinating because I did not ask specifically about jihadists, but what that said to me was this is no surprise therefore that militant jihadist groups are using poetry to propagate their message when it clearly still resonates so strongly on the ground."

On this week's podcast, Alexander Thurston speaks about Boko Haram and its origins and growth. Thurston is an Assistant Professor of Teaching for African Studies Program at Georgetown University and a Fellow at the Wilson Center. His new book is Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement. "This is my attempt at a documentary history of Boko Haram. To try to draw on especially diverse written sources to reconstruct the trajectory of the movement from the time when the founders were growing up in Nigeria in the 1970s up to close to the present as it was possible to get," said Thurston. "These groups are just very hard to completely eradicate. A proto-state that they carve out can be destroyed. It may take several years, as in the case of ISIS or it may take a very short time, as in the case of Boko Haram. But then after that, you get this long term spate of terrorist attacks. And that's a lot harder to stamp out."