Network Mobilization Dynamics In Uncertain Times In The Middle East And North Africa

This comprehensive volume investigates the dynamics of mobilization and demobilization of social networks before, during, and after episodes of political turbulence in the Middle East region, focusing particularly on the 2011 Arab uprisings. The authors consider important questions regarding agency, strategic action, and institutional outcomes that have significance for social mobilization, social movements, and authoritarian governance. This collection proposes an interactive perspective linking up contentious politics with routine governance through a dynamic articulation of repertoires of contention. The authors use a micro-mobilization perspective to frame the different trajectories of protest networks in times of uncertainty. They place the interactions between grassroots activists, structured organizations, and state actors at the centre of the explanation of change and stability in the recent mobilizations of the region. By starting with descriptions of interactions at the grassroots level, the authors then explain macro level dynamics between networks and other players, including the state. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Movement Studies.

This book examines the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa, and how it impacts young people’s civic and political participation today. The edited volume analyses the extent to which young people influence public policies, social, cultural and economic structures, and how on the other hand these young people are influenced by the same structures. It focuses on the politics and agency of youth, and how they impact social change and continuity in the Middle East and North Africa. The book will be of great value to students, scholars and researchers interested in Youth Movements, MENA, Comparative Politics and Political Economy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

In the The Middle East, Sixteenth Edition, Ellen Lust brings important new coverage to this comprehensive, balanced, and superbly researched text. In clear prose, Lust and her outstanding contributors explain the landscape of this changing region by examining both regional trends and individual countries. The Sixteenth Edition adds a chapter on Sudan, and other country chapters have been streamlined and fully updated to reflect domestic, regional, and international changes of the past three years. This best-selling text offers a wealth of information to help readers not only comprehend more fully the world around them, but also recognize and formulate policies that can more successfully engage the vitally important Middle East.

This book offers a comparative, theory-grounded study of Maghrebi political parties since the Arab uprisings, specifically focused on Tunisia and Morocco in the first decade after the 2011 watershed elections. Based on primary sources, including in-depth interviews and updated party statutes and bylaws, the author introduces four case studies of key Islamist and anti-Islamist parties, exploring their organisational standing, internal working, and legitimating assets. By dwelling into a topic long neglected, the author provides insight into the "hybrid" nature of political parties in the Maghreb, oscillating between juxtaposed traditional and modern discourses and ambivalent sources of political authority. As such, it is hybridisation that shapes parties’ organisational choices and development and accounts for differences within parties. In the wake of political liberalisation, the author argues that political parties have become increasingly distant from society, distrusted by a large part of the citizenry. Ultimately, the Tunisian and Moroccan cases invite reflection on similar phenomena taking place within the Middle East and North Africa region, and even outside of it. Bridging disparate disciplines, including comparative politics, area studies, and contemporary Middle Eastern history, the book will be of interest to a broad range of graduate-level students and academics.

This scholarly book provides a timely examination of China’s growing influence in the Mediterranean region. It offers a comparative and theoretical perspective underpinned by an up-to-date empirical analysis. The book uses role theory as the theoretical framework throughout, exploring the escalating tensions in the Mediterranean, where a complex triangular relationship seems to have emerged, largely due to China’s expanding presence on both the Southern and Northern shores. Beijing’s sustained engagement and increasing influence have significantly affected the perceptions of France, the region’s former colonial power, and Spain, as well as global competitors such as Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf states. From a security standpoint, China’s engagement in the Mediterranean has also raised concerns in the United States. Within this multifaceted context, the chapters in this volume scrutinize how the evolving interactions between China and the Mediterranean states elucidate the progression of Sino-Southern Mediterranean relations and Sino-Northern Mediterranean relations. Moreover, the current conflict in Gaza has heightened interest in China’s role in the Mediterranean and the broader Middle East. This volume is undoubtedly a valuable resource for academics, policymakers, and students at both undergraduate and graduate levels with an interest in strategic studies, politics, diplomacy and international relations. The chapters in this book were initially published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

This book offers a fresh look at the role of coalitions in contentious politics in North Africa and the Middle East, based on conceptual reflexions and empirical case studies by researchers who have conducted extensive fieldwork in the region. Coalitions of actors that have traditionally not been allies have become a key feature of the protest movements that have emerged across North Africa and the Middle East since 2011. But what happens when Islamists ally with Leftists, workers with student unions and young engineers with local tribesmen? How do coalitions form across ideological, generational, professional, ethnic and class divides? Are such collaborations transformative? The authors seek to show that it is important to go beyond analyses that focus mainly on identifying the factors that led to a coalition’s success or failure: coalitions are moments of transformative encounter that can lead to changes affecting relations with political authorities, ideological learnings, repertoires of action and understandings of the notion of right. Instead of analyzing coalitions and social divides as two opposite processes, this book further argues that studying the alliance of social groups goes hand in hand with exploring processes of differentiation that are engineered by both political regimes and social actors. Focusing on the role of coalitions in contentious politics, before and after the Arab uprisings, this book proposes a sociology of coalitions in the Middle East based on key empirical examples, to analyze the transformations that emerged out of such alliances at the levels of repertoires of action, forms of organization, relations to political authorities and ideological learnings. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics. In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria’s borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man’s land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen. The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.