{"title":"Remembering Defeat in Counter-Revolutionary Egypt","authors":"J. Naeff","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168380","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article analyses how a creative writing workshop in 2017 Cairo dynamically engaged with cultural memories of the 1967 defeat of the Arab armies. The article first situates 1967 as a crucial reference point in discursive attempts to tie personal life stories to national history and in making sense of a widespread feeling of postcolonial disenchantment. It is in the ruinous aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, when a view on a political horizon beyond the stifling present temporarily was reopened, that the workshop critically examined the relations between cultural memory, family history, and everyday life with, at its center, the notion of defeat in all its shapes and intensities. The article argues that the workshop can be seen as ‘an intimate public,’ carving out a space for survival lying largely outside of the sphere of politics. Nevertheless, in its affective plurality that stimulated modes of irreverence, the workshop tentatively opened up new political dispositions under the strenuous conditions of post-2013 Egypt.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"53 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49538993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Right-Wing Populism and Turkey’s Post-Hegemonic Populist Moment","authors":"Omer Tekdemir","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168384","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Populism, as a mode of political logic, always has been a significant factor within Turkey’s political landscape, and it strongly is associated with right-wing political parties. The AKP’s conservative democratic populism and neo-right-wing mission arose as a sui generis governmental orientation out of the organic crisis of the Kemalist regime by articulating the collective political passion and the common affects it engenders in the populace. This article argues that right-wing populism developed as a transformative politics embracing neoliberal economics that subverted the anti-status quo through a counter-hegemonic discourse and electoral strategy. The AKP’s empty signifier is an example of radical negativity with its antagonistic division between a hegemonic power bloc (corrupt elites) and an excluded underdog (pure people). However, within a post-democracy conjuncture, the AKP adopted a new radical right-wing populism based on a Turkish-Islamic synthesis. The party’s electoral hegemony is crumbling and ruptured by an authoritarian and illiberal politics that has created a post-hegemonic populist moment.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"91 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44532495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause","authors":"Sune Haugbolle, Pelle Valentin Olsen","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168379","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the late 1960s, Palestine became an iconic signifier of solidarity and support for the Left, but also a transgressive tool that shaped and re-situated ideological positions at domestic levels. In this article, we attempt to answer why, how, and when this happened. Most research to date has stressed the global diplomatic offensive by the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Palestinian revolutionary thought and action are obviously the primary explanatory factors for the emergence of their cause internationally. However, a one-sided approach blurs the agency of the global revolutionaries and solidarity activists who helped elevate Palestine to a global cause. This article takes a comparative approach and uses Denmark and Norway as two illustrative examples of Palestine’s transformation into a global leftist cause. Denmark and Norway are central cases because solidarity movements in Scandinavia developed early on, and because they exemplify how Fatah, in Norway, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in Denmark, advanced different models of solidarity and cultural diplomacy. We compare these two cases with new evidence from other countries in order to summarize how a cultural transfer of symbols, interpretations, experiences, and ideological positioning took place in the 1960s and 1970s through meetings, translations, and organizational links.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"129 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42331183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Eric Hooglund","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168382","url":null,"abstract":"We open our Spring 2023 issue with a significant analysis—and critique—of the European Union’s post-2006 policy toward the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, two territories that have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967. Madrid-based scholar, Itxaso Dom ınguez de Olaz abel, argues in ‘EU Policies in Historic Palestine’ that EU policies are focused almost exclusively on pressuring the Palestinian Authority, set up in parts of the West Bank in 1995, to comply with Israeli security demands. In so doing, EU policies ignore both the history of the Palestinian ‘problem’ and its continuing and negative ramifications for Palestinians living under Israeli (primarily) and other legal regimes. In effect, EU policy treats the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign entity, ignoring the reality of its subordination to Israeli military control. The Palestinian ‘problem’ dates backs to the November 1947 vote of the then new United Nations to divide the UK’s Palestine Mandate—mandate being a fancy 1920s term for a colony—into an Arab and a Jewish state. The UN vote led to a civil war in Palestine; the intervention of Arab armies, primarily from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, to protect the Arab state—which never came into existence; the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian civilians, most of whom became refugees in Gaza and Lebanon; the establishment of the new state of Israel on 78 percent of the former Palestine Mandate; and two Palestinian-inhabited territories: the Gaza Strip under Egyptian administration and the West Bank under Jordanian administration until the June 1967 War, when Israel seized control of both areas. The Oslo Peace Process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1993 to 2000 was supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian state comprised of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, the summer 2000 failure of final status peace talks, ‘mediated’ by the United States—which blamed the PLO for the collapse of negotiations—led to four years of intifada [uprising] in Gaza and the West Bank, albeit with Israel always in control of the conflict and the Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties and destruction. An Egyptian-mediated agreement ended the conflict in February 2005, although since then Gaza has had its own government separate from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it also literally is sealed off from the rest of the world, as its land and Mediterranean Sea borders are tightly controlled by Egypt and Israel. It is within this political context that EU policy visa-vis Palestine and Palestinians is not focused on the much needed economic, educational and social development programs that would contribute to peace but rather on security assistance so that the Palestinian Authority can comply with Israeli-defined","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60350986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Neoliberal Cage: Alternative Analysis of the Rise of Populist Tunisia","authors":"Carmen Fulco, Mattia Giampaolo","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168383","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract On the occasion of Tunisia’s 2019 legislative and presidential elections, politics witnessed the proliferation of distinct varieties of populism that culminated in the electoral victory of the current president, Kais Saied. This article argues that the Kais Saied phenomenon inscribes into a Tunisian ‘populist moment’ that found fertile terrain in the protraction of the socioeconomic crisis and the absence of a radical critique of the neoliberal order. Although Kais Saied proposed an alternative to traditional politics in his electoral campaign, he did not seem likely to shake the foundations on which Tunisia’s neoliberal cage has been built. Rather, an empirical analysis of the context of his ascent suggests that populism à la Kais Saied surfaced as the by-product of an unquestioned neoliberal order, reinforced by the political elite of the post-Arab Uprisings period.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"27 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43419130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modified J-Curve Theory, Iran’s Socio-Economic Bottlenecks and the 1979 Fall of the Pahlavi Monarchy","authors":"G. Vatandoust, M. Sheipari","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2023.2168381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2168381","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract No one disputes the authenticity of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that led to the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and left its footprint in the region and the world at large. This research is an attempt to revisit the Islamic Revolution from an entirely new perspective, looking at the fall of the Pahlavi regime from a combined modified J-Curve Theory of James Davis and Abraham Maslow’s theory of human needs. These combined theories are applied to the socio-economic conditions that lead to the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 1979. The article aims to determine the socioeconomic variants within the general framework and limitations of the J-Curve and to modify the theory to further explain the more ambiguous aspects that fall beyond the socioeconomic components, those defined as the ‘self-actualization needs,’ in what Maslow describes as the basic self-fulfillment aspirations of human beings. The study has several major objectives. Foremost it concentrates on a review of the socioeconomic bottlenecks during the last fifteen years prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Observers regard these as the years of economic and social growth and prosperity. However, these years also led the country to the brink of collapse and revolution. The study seeks to analyze the socio-economic boom and bust in Iran’s development and the rapid decline during the final years prior to the fall of the Pahlavi regime. The attempt is to try and understand the reasons behind the bottlenecks and failures of many of the policies adopted by the regime and to test the validity of the J-Curve theory. The study also looks beyond Davies’ theory of revolution and argues that the J-Curve cannot respond to higher levels of human needs, particularly the self-actualization needs proposed by Maslow. To resolve this issue, we expand the J-Curve theory to include other paradigms as it became necessary to modify the J-Curve to suit the case. Evidence shows that the Shah promised more than he delivered, which led to his ultimate fall because his promise of a ‘Great Civilization’ could not be realized.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"111 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48351984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Receiving End of Diaspora Engagement Policies: Evidence from the Turkish Diaspora in Sweden","authors":"Arne F Wackenhut","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2132194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2132194","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: While many states directly engage their non-resident populations to rally support for domestic political agendas, extract remittances, or to further foreign policy objectives, few countries have been more active in this space than Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). By the early 2020s, researchers and scholars had obtained a fairly good understanding of the ways in which the Turkish government seeks to (selectively) engage or cooperate with, but also to suppress some members of what it perceives as its diaspora. These efforts are specified in official diaspora engagement policies and implemented through, for instance, governmental institutions like the ‘Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities’ (YTB), or cultural institutions like the ‘Yunus Emre Institutes.’ However, even though scholars have learned a fair bit about the supply side of Turkish diaspora engagement, we know comparatively little about the demand side of and for such efforts. To begin filling this gap, this article switches perspectives from the supplier to the consumer/recipient and seeks to understand better the ways in which diasporans perceive, relate to, and engage with such efforts. By building on primary and secondary sources as well as semi-structured interviews with members of the Turkish diaspora in Sweden, this article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the varied ways in which diasporans relate and react to different forms of state-led diaspora engagement.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"371 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44148415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Home and Host Country Policy Interaction in the Making of Turkey’s Diasporas","authors":"Gözde Böcü","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2135364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2135364","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 Recent accounts in diaspora studies have advanced our understanding of various political, social and economic transnational phenomena and processes that take place between the home state and the diaspora. However, there is a growing trend in the literature that focuses on home-state diaspora relations at the expense of the core tenant of the transnationalism framework, namely the assumption that immigrant transborder politics and connections span various dynamics that involve both the home and the host country. In this article, I argue that we must revisit calls for simultaneity and turn to the interaction of policies between the home and host state when analyzing diaspora making and shaping processes. To demonstrate my argument, I analyze historical policy interactions between Turkey’s diaspora policy and Germany’s immigration and integration policy and show how interactive dynamics between the home and host country have simultaneously shaped politics in Turkey’s diasporas over time.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"355 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43730008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Exit to Voice: Reflections on Exile through the Accounts of Turkey’s Intelligentsia","authors":"Bahar Başer, A. Ozturk","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2132193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2132193","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 The authoritarian turn in Turkey compelled many citizens to change life trajectories which included extreme measures such as migration and exile. Thousands of people left Turkey in the last decade, this recent wave constituting one of the largest Turkish migrations to Europe and beyond. The profile of the migrants included those who were comfortable with and/or opposed the current regime’s political and social policies, members of oppressed minority groups, Gülen movement members who are accused of orchestrating the failed 2016 coup attempt as well as white collar and secular Turkish citizens who made lifestyle migration choices because of the political and economic developments in the country. The article focuses on the narratives of a specific group within this new wave, those whom we refer to as Turkey’s intelligentsia in exile, and who decided to leave Turkey following the Gezi protests in 2013. The findings are based on 25 interviews conducted in 2021 with former academics, activists, artists, journalists and politicians who migrated to a variety of locations as a result of pending trials or arrest warrants against them, dehumanization discourse that pro-regime politicians directed toward them, as well as lack of freedom of speech and assembly.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"401 - 415"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49202525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Home-State Politics Vis-à-Vis Turkish Emigrants: Instrumentalizing Emigrants","authors":"Ayhan Kaya","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2135362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2135362","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 This article scrutinizes the ways in which Turkish state actors have shaped the social ecosophy of emigrants and their descendants residing in Europe. Describing the Turkish state’s perspectives toward emigrants reveals that Turkish state actors always have instrumentalized emigrants since the beginning of the migratory processes in the 1960s. The focus will be on the current Turkish government’s acts and policies, which are likely to contribute to the Muslimization of Turkey-origin emigrants in diaspora, or in other words, to their labeling simply as ‘Muslims’. Based on a thorough analysis of secondary literature, discourse analyses of contemporary Turkish political leaders’ speeches aimed at Turkish emigrants and their descendants as well as my earlier and ongoing field research findings, I argue that it is the indifference of some European state actors who have not offered political opportunity structures for devout Muslims with Turkish background to be incorporated into the public/political space at the expense of pushing them into the Turkish state actors’ hands that offer alternative political opportunity structures. Hence, the article elaborates the ways in which receiving states’ policies and practices toward migrant-origin people impact diaspora politics of the migrant-sending states. The emphasis is on German and Turkish state actors.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"327 - 340"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41823196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}