Taking stock of MENA political science after the uprisings

Abstract

This Special Issue demonstrates the scope and breadth of the response by political scientists to the 2011 Arab uprisings. The contributions show the significant, rigorous development of understanding key mechanisms and issues such as protest mobilization, repression, sectarianism and international alliances. They also demonstrate the enduring relevance of the Area Studies Controversy, the value of building and exploiting new data sources, and the importance of close attention to cases. At the same time, they reveal growing problems with access to Middle Eastern countries for political science research. The articles reveal intriguing similarities and differences between the European and American fields, and the potential for productive dialogue. KEYWORDS Arab uprisings; Middle East and North Africa; Area Studies Controversy; comparative politics; International RelationsThis Special Issue (SI) takes the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Arab uprisings of 2011 to reflect upon the performance of the field of political science in the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There is little question that there has been an efflorescence of research and publication on the Middle East since 2011. The uprisings, failed and successful transitions, authoritarian restorations, and civil wars have offered ample ground for scholars to revisit old theories and to develop new ones. The crush of events and demand for new forms of expertise also made MENA political science more directly relevant to the rest of the discipline than ever before. A decade on is a good time for a reckoning, across subfields: has all of this academic activity produced new theoretical approaches or significantly improved our understanding MENA politics?This SI brings together a set of novel and insightful reflections by Europebased scholars which aim, in the words of the editors, 'to take stock of political science research on the MENA a decade after the Arab uprisings.' The SI showcases the genuinely impressive progress made by MENA political science scholars in the decade since the uprisings. The essays focus on three

Waiting for IR Godot? In search of transformative encounters between Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations

“…In the American academia, the debate has not been revived since the 1990s. There, the combination of ‘methodological sophistication with significant field research and language skills’, ‘the escalating fetishization of method and prioritizing causal inference’ and ‘changes in the publication expectations and the job market’ has considerably reduced the salience of the ASC (Lynch, 2021).…”

“…Domestically, the initially peaceful protests that erupted in Tunisia and Egypt and then spread to Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries across the region have led to regime change in Tunisia and Egypt, the outbreak of civil conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Libya while they have been coopted and/or repressed in monarchical system where the status quo was thereby preserved, such as in Morocco and Bahrain. Besides amply modifying domestic notions of security, the events since 2010/11 saw international factors becoming key variables to explain regional dynamics and more specifically security trajectories in and of the region, as new interests in the ‘second image reversed’ 1 (Gourevitch, 1978) perspective is showing (see also Lynch, 2021). The year 2011, while in no way a unique occurrence, given the region's deep history of social mobilization and conflicts, did act as a catalyst for an evolving multipolar regional system characterized by, among others, deeply internationalized security, an intensification of threat perceptions and alternative security narratives as exemplified by the debate on sectarianism and sectarianization (Malmvig, 2014; Hashemi and Postel, 2017; Valbjørn, 2017; Mabon, 2020; Pomeps, 2020).…”