Aim of the SeriesThe Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East. The Arab Spring uprisings have complicated this picture. This series puts forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship that reflects the current political and social realities of the region, focusing on original research about contentious politics and social movements; political institutions; the role played by nongovernmental organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Other themes of interest include Iran and Turkey as emerging pre-eminent powers in the region, the former an 'Islamic Republic' and the latter an emerging democracy currently governed by a party with Islamic roots; the Gulf monarchies, their petrol economies and regional ambitions; potential problems of nuclear proliferation in the region; and the challenges confronting the United States, Europe, and the United Nations in the greater Middle East. The focus of the series is on general topics such as social turmoil, war and revolution, international relations, occupation, radicalism, democracy, human rights, and Islam as a political force in the context of the modern Middle East.More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14803

The article argues that sovereignty claims and counterclaims are still very much at work in international and civil conflicts involving state actors. Focusing on the case of the Syrian conflict, the article engages in methodological triangulation using Critical Discourse Analysis and international relations theories. It finds that the sovereignty-first narrative adopted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and its external allies such as Russia, has built an ‘effective’ discourse that has been adopted in a coherent, consistent, and resonant manner, as well as a ‘credible’ discourse which combined words with actions (i.e. performatives and constatives of sovereignty). The effectiveness and credibility of the sovereignty-first narrative is also judged by the absence of effective and credible contending narratives demonstrated by the tepid application of concepts like the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by the United States and its European allies. In making these comparisons, the Syrian conflict can be contextualised by relating it to the Arab Spring and geopolitical shifts in international affairs. It is within this contextualisation that the article demonstrates broader claims about the endurance of the ‘territorial state’ in the Middle East.

Research on the powers or roles of first ladies in authoritarian Arab states suffers from two gaps. First, there are always attempts to homogenize women under which the president’s spouse is simply subsumed within categories such as “Arab women,” “Muslim women,” or “Egyptian women.” Second, literature explaining the dynamics of authoritarian durability has mainly focused on what is institutional, for instance, the army, legislature, and political parties. This article focuses on a single woman as part of the toolbox authoritarian leaders use to maintain power and as part of their political expediency. It uses quantitative and qualitative methods to track the progression of the roles of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, and the manifestations of these roles in the state media throughout Mubarak’s rule (1981–2011). The frame analysis of 1,339 articles found this progression to be linear; that is, Suzanne Mubarak moved from traditional ceremonial roles in the 1980s to policy-oriented ones in the 1990s to political roles, even acting as “copresident” in the 2000s. Through interviews, the data-based findings are contextualized within historically conditioned challenges facing the regime, such as relations with Islamists, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies, and Hosni Mubarak’s frail health in the final years of his rule.