Editor’s Note

Abstract

Qatar’s activist foreign policy has led to successful (and unsuccessful) mediation efforts in several regional conflicts and disputes; Mehran Kamrava looks at the record and the motivations in “Mediation in Qatari Foreign Policy.” At a time when counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare is again a prominent debate in Western military circles, Clive Jones offers some useful historical parallels in “Military Intelligence, Tribes, and Britain’s war in Dhofar, 1970–1976,” which in addition to its historical contribution should prove of interest to intelligence and military professionals. Patrice Flynn in her contribution, “The Saudi Arabian Labor Force: A Comprehensive Statistical Portrait,” seeks to lay out a model for accurately measuring labor force statistics in Saudi Arabia. Proposing a model similar to that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this analytical tool will be helpful in tracking the increasing participation of women in the labor force. As “AfPak” has become convenient shorthand in Washington, it is easy to forget the toll that the multiple wars in Afghanistan have taken on many people who have fled the country and on the host countries (mostly Pakistan and Iran) dealing with the refugees. Maliha Safri looks at how the discourse about those refugees has changed in “The Transformation of the Afghan Refugee, 1979–2009.” With sectarian clashes and major confrontations again this year in Bahrain, Hasan Alhasan offers of a study of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB) during the disturbances and plots of 1981 and looks at the evidence of links to the Islamic Revolutionary regime in Iran which had come to power two years before in “The Role of Iran in the Failed Coup of 1981: The IFLB in Bahrain.” With the increasing strain on US-Pakistani relations, the book review article for this issue, “In Search of Pakistan” by Marvin G. Weinbaum, deals with six recent books on Pakistan. In addition to the full range of book reviews, there is the quarterly “Chronology,” which has appeared in every issue since our beginning and which is once again longer than usual because of the continuing dramatic developments in the region. Sharp-eyed readers may notice a change in the format of the document identifiers, or DOIs, at the bottom of the title page of each article and section. Now appearing as a link, these ID numbers form a permanent reference to the online version of each article through our partnership with CrossRef. Typing that link into any web browser will now direct you to the PDF of the article, available online as part of your subscription. Between issues, be sure to follow our several series of online publications at http://www.mei.edu and my daily blog, the MEI Editor’s Blog, at http://mideasti.blogspot.com.