Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

  "Signs to people who reflect" by scholesyfynn  By Erika Biagini  Women are central to Islamist movements, the success of their political projects as well as their ability to survive state-led repression. In Islamist movements, women are not only those who give birth and nurture the new generations of activists, but they are also the ones who convey to them and their immediate communities the values, ideology and culture that their movements espouse. Women are also among the activists involved in the setting up and running of the large networks of Islamist social and religious associations, and are usually the first in line at polling stations in times of elections to cast their vote for Islamist candidates. Crucially, they are those who sustain Islamists in times of repression, guaranteeing their survival. Women do so by looking after the prisoners and their families, collecting funds for the movement and advocating for the prisoners’ freedom, when they are not the ones...

  Adania Shibli by Ronit Lentin Review of Adania Shibli (2020) Minor Detail, London: Fitzcaraldo Editions (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), 112 pp, £12.99 On 12 August 1949 the atmosphere at the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) outpost in Nirim in the Naqab desert near the Gaza Strip was particularly festive. It was the end of an arduous week of dusty chases in the western Naqab sand dunes after Palestinian ‘infiltrators,’ refugees attempting to get back to the homes they had been expelled from by the colonizing Zionist forces. The platoon commander, lieutenant ‘Moshe,’ told his soldiers to get the dining tent ready for a party. Tables were set with sweets and wine and at eight o’clock, he gave his soldiers a pep talk about Zionism and the important contribution they were making to the newly established State of Israel. Towards the end of the party ‘Moshe’ reminded his soldiers of the 12 year old Bedouin girl they had captured earlier that day, now locked up in one of the huts.  ...

By Trent Tetterton Traditional scholarship has forced the trajectories of subnational movements such as uprisings, revolutions, and secessions into a reductive framework of understanding defined by “success” or “failure.” In the case of secession—a term functionally conceptualized as “an attempt by an ethnic group claiming a homeland to withdraw its territory from the authority of a larger state” and applied to movements both to create new states or increase regional autonomy (Horowitz 2011: 158-159) —, “success” has been considered the realization of a secessionist group’s aim. Such an outcome, scholars contend, has historically rested on effective external assistance and international recognition (Horowitz 2011: 159; Dugard and Raič 2006: 99; Fabry 2011: 251).     Yet, despite the arguable need to understand what leads to/detracts from “success,” in the traditional sense, some have challenged this focus. Schwedler, for example, argues that centering on success as state-...

In this podcast, we talk to Aslı Vatansever, author of the book At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity (Brill, 2020) about academic precarity, political repression, and the possibility for resistance.  Aslı Vatansever (PhD, University of Hamburg, 2010) is a sociologist of work and social stratification with a focus on precarious academic labour. After she got dismissed from her position as associate professor and banned from public service in Turkey due to her participation in the Academics for Peace campaign in 2016, she has been hosted as guest researcher at various institutions in Germany and Italy.  Her ongoing research project at Bard College Berlin investigates forms of academic labour activism in Europe. Her books include Sources of Islamism in the Ottoman Empire (2010), Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker (2015, co-authored with Meral Gezici-Yalçın), and At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Pr...

  An Afghan police officer receives treatment for wounds sustained in a suicide bombing. Source: Wiki commons. By Sean McCafferty Introduction The prevalence of suicide Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has drawn significant attention from academia. Although over the past 10 years the number of suicide bombings have proliferated, becoming a consistent feature of intra-state conflicts (AOAV, 2019), existing approaches to understanding political violence in the MENA region have not done enough to offer meaningful and non-Orientalist analysis. As a result, this piece argues that there is a pressing need to move in a new direction.   In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing ‘War on Terror,’ academia became focused on the psychology of suicide bombers (Ward, 2018: 88), often concluding that this form of political violence is driven by cultural or religious factors indigenous to the MENA region. This overwhelming focus on individual...