Editor's introduction

Abstract

This issue of the Digest of Middle East Studies features articles presenting research on a range of timely and important topics, from party politics to foreign policy, political economy, and media representation.

The performance of Islamist parties in electoral competition and in governance is a subject of long-standing interest, and it has attracted attention anew in the years since the Arab Spring. In particular, political scientists and policymakers have often asked whether the presence of Islamist parties inevitably damages prospects for democracy, and whether electoral participation will result in ideological or political shifts within Islamist parties themselves. Our first two articles offer a reevaluation of some of the earlier political science research on these questions. Justin Curtis assesses the performance of Islamist parties both in elections and in governing coalitions, offering a convincing and empirically grounded argument that seat gains alone are an insufficient measure of electoral success. His new empirical measures support conclusions about both the types of Islamist parties likely to be included in governance and the meaning of such inclusion for democratic systems. Mohamed Saad, approaching the subject from another perspective, seeks to test the well-known inclusion-moderation hypothesis through application to two cases, Iraq and Sudan, where he argues the evidence points to a radicalization, rather than moderation, of Islamist parties. Saad attributes this not only to the parties' political and economic resources, but to the particulars of the two political contexts, in which identity and grievance politics were sources of mobilization for the party and resulted in the continuation of conflict within the systems.

Mehmet Onder also addresses an issue of enormous interest to policymakers and scholar alike in his study of the effects of economic sanctions on minority groups. His research shows that the imposition of economic sanctions leads the states targeted by such sanctions to enact policies that discriminate against minority groups. He also finds that this result is more harmful to minority groups in cases where comprehensive sanctions are imposed, compared to more narrowly targeted sanctions. This study offers a clear contribution to the further development of foreign policy in the Middle East and around the world.

The final two articles of the issue both address recent and important developments in Saudi Arabia, although in very different spheres of public life. Tariq Elyas, Abdulrahman Aljabri, Nesreen Al-Harbi, and Areej Al-Jahani offer a study of media representation, comparing British and Saudi newspapers’ visual depictions of Saudi women. Western media outlets have long represented Saudi women as the epitome of the otherness of Muslim and Arab women, shown as hidden and anonymous in traditional forms of dress. But while policies affecting women's rights in Saudi Arabia may have advanced in recent years, these media representations have not shifted equally across outlets; the images in this article from a Saudi newspaper are strikingly different from the British examples.

Last but certainly not least, a detailed political economy study from Hashem Alnemer addresses the increasingly important subject of the tourism sector in Saudi Arabia. Applying the approach of interpretive structured modeling, this study identifies the set of variables that have the effect of promoting entrepreneurship in the tourism industry, providing an analysis that both enables a more nuanced understanding of this sector of the Saudi economy and identifies particular elements important to the development of policy in this area.

I thank the authors for contributing these articles to the Digest of Middle East Studies, allowing us to continue to provide empirically grounded research that is both deeply engaged in the academic literatures and relevant to a range of policy debates. I am also very grateful to our peer reviewers, who generously provide their time and expertise in reviewing the research and ensuring the continuation of our high standards for publication. We are pleased to present you with this issue's collection of articles and hope you will find them all interesting and engaging.