Middle East Critique最新文献

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Eric Hooglund","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2063098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2063098","url":null,"abstract":"War has been a political reality and human tragedy in some part of the Middle East since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, for example, Afghanistan was convulsed in civil warfare between a then new Afghan political-religious group, the Taliban, and a rival group known as the Northern Alliance, while in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, an uprising—intifada—against Israeli rule erupted in September, following the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that had been taking place under the auspices of the Oslo Peace Process. In subsequent years, the United States (US) sent military forces to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, which it accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, the mostly (dissident) Saudi group, responsible for carrying out the attacks in 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and then to Iraq, to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the past decade, the US effectively forgot about Oslo and the plight of Palestinians under de facto Israeli rule; instead it has been providing military assistance to its Middle East allies, such as militia groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria and to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to support their joint endeavor to prop up their favored ally in Yemen’s brutal civil war. Meanwhile, in the background throughout the past two decades a de facto cold war has persisted between the US and Iran while simultaneously in neighboring Afghanistan the US military remained to fight the Taliban and to prop up a civilian regime whose authority did not seem to extend beyond the capital, Kabul, and a few other cities. In July 2021, the US announced it would withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan in accordance with an agreement that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020. This prompted Afghanistan’s civilian president and several cabinet officials to flee in secret even before the Americans began their withdrawal. The Taliban quickly returned from their bases in Pakistan, took over towns with barely a fight, and then entered Kabul to observe what only can be described as a two-week chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the airport, along with thousands of Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution. By mid-August, the twenty-year, multi-billion dollar American experiment of nation building in Afghanistan ingloriously ended, although multiple unresolved other conflicts in the Middle East remained. Six months later, on February 24, 2022, Middle East issues were overshadowed by a very real hot war in the heart of Europe as a result of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic (pre-1991). The first six weeks of war were","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"99 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42201854","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":"Forbidden Melodies: Music and Arab-Jewish Identity in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema","authors":"R. Yosef","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2059213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2059213","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000 This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"165 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44798157","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 Mahdavī Society: The Rise of Millennialism in Iran as the Cultural Outcome of Social Movements (2000–2016)","authors":"A. Teimouri","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2052468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2052468","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000 This study asks questions about the understudied cultural, especially discursive, consequences of social movements at large, and rightist movements in particular. Focusing on the discursive repertoire of the Islamist rightist movement in Iran (known as principlism), I demonstrate that in response to the liberal Reform Movement (1997–2005), the principlist groups in Iran weaponized a millennial language against liberal reformists beginning in the early 2000s. The institutionalization of the Islamist principlist movement in 2005 mainstreamed this politicized language, giving rise to a new cultural reform politics in the country known under Aḥmadīnizhād as the Mahdavī discourse (millennialism). That is, the Mahdavī discourse represented a new cultural reconfiguration, or “cultural engineering,” in state politics. However, the Green Movement of 2009 as well as the Arab uprisings divided the unified Mahdavī discourse within the principlist movement into divergent millennial discourses. Drawing on millennial-oriented news stories and events from the early 2000s until the rise of the self-identified Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, I highlight the millennial discourses, as well as the Islamist-centered cultural engineering project, as the discursive outcomes of social movements.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"125 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44420865","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":"Reproduction of Palestinian Heterotopic Space: Encountering First Wave of Covid-19 in East Jerusalem","authors":"M. Samman, Yara Saifi","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2059212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2059212","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article was written during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in East Jerusalem between March and June 2020. It discusses how the Palestinians approached the pandemic within the context of occupation, and how they used their power to reproduce what Henri Lefebvre called heterotopic spaces. People articulated these spaces accumulatively as they sought meaning in their daily lives, while managing the pandemic and benefitting from their previous experiences during their struggle against Israeli occupation. Thus, the aim is to shed light on the evolving role of civil society to support local action in dealing with a pandemic and to understand COVID-19 from peoples’ perspective rather than from a top-bottom lens in occupied cities. The methodology is multilayered: We use theoretical concepts of heterotopic spaces and analyze them through the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical forms of knowledge borrowed from Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. It also builds on participant observation, official and media sources, and semi-structured interviews conducted with heads of committees of the Jerusalem Cluster community initiative. Accordingly, the study illustrates how the voices of the people become more significant in taking a leading role in a pandemic crisis in an occupied city.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"181 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45485122","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":"Land Reform and Kurdish Nationalism in Postcolonial Iraq","authors":"Nicola Degli Esposti","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2055517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2055517","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 This article revisits the origins of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq, problematizing the narrative, shared by nationalists and scholars alike, that presents the 1961–1975 insurgency solely as a moment of national awakening. Placing the Kurdish revolt within the social and political conflicts of postcolonial Iraq reveals its strong connection to the Iraqi Revolution of 1958. The early stages of the 1961 revolt must be understood as a reaction of the Kurdish landed class against the post-revolutionary land reform policy and the empowerment of the peasantry. The Kurdish tribal and landowning elite successfully turned its revolt into a national revolution by forcing progressive urban nationalists into a position of subordination and demobilizing the peasantry, formerly the backbone of the anticolonial movement. The hegemonic position of the landed class, won in 1961, had long-term consequences on the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq determining its conservative character and the persistent marginalization and depoliticization of the subaltern classes.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"147 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41589336","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":"Decolonizing Knowledge Production: Perspective on Promotion and Tenure Regulations in Palestine and beyond","authors":"M. Kassis, R. Giacaman, Maher Z. Hashweh","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2052466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2052466","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Using the model of promotion and tenure regulations prevalent in Palestine as an impetus, this article argues that these regulations perpetuate neo-coloniality by localizing and reproducing hegemonic center–periphery relations in academia. This is especially true when it comes to using scientometric criteria in the evaluation of knowledge produced by Arab academics and which gives preference to English language over Arabic language publications, to journals over monographs, and when adopting Western assumptions about the form and substance of academic knowledge production. Consequently, Arab universities expand the reach of Western dominance and its control techniques.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"105 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48922938","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":"Reflections on the Failure of the Egyptian Revolution","authors":"Gianni Del Panta","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2030982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2030982","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 Between January 2011 and July 2013, Egypt underwent a revolutionary period. While the roots and sequences of the Egyptian revolution have been studied comprehensively, much less has been said about the reasons behind the revolution’s defeat. The reason is twofold. On the one hand, scholars prevalently have explored democratization’s failure. On the other hand, the way in which Egyptian events were understood logically prevented the possibility of analyzing the 2011–2013 situation as an example of a failed revolution. By showing that the emergence of democracy was the most unlikely outcome and adopting an inter-social approach, the present article deals with the failure of social revolution in Egypt. In particular, it argues that the interaction between worldwide ideologies, epochal intellectual currents and (supposedly) successful contemporary revolutions on the one hand, and an internal context shaped by the legacies of Nasserism, the peculiar fate of the communist left and the institutional environment on the other, negatively affected the capacity of the subaltern classes even to outline an alternative political system. The non-emergence of popular bodies rendered unlikely the collapse of state apparatuses, making it impossible for revolutionaries to take power by extra-constitutional means and determining the defeat of the revolution.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"21 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42889512","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":"Multiple Consciousness and Transnationalism in Iranian Armenian Cultural Productions","authors":"C. Yaghoobi","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2030985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2030985","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term ‘double consciousness’ to describe an individual with an identity with several facets, particularly in the context of African-American experiences. A century later, Du Bois’ theory was expanded into a concept called ‘triple consciousness’ to acknowledge the intersectional construction of identities where race might have intersected with ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. to generate complex, multivalent forms of subordination. Expanding Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’ to Chicana experiences, and disrupting nationalist Anglocentrism, in Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa theorized the ‘border’ as a metaphor for geographical transgressions, sexual boundary crossings, social displacements, and linguistic and cultural dislocations. In conversation with these theorists, I examine Iranian Armenian ‘multiple consciousnesses’, by highlighting their various expressions of diaspora, their many ways of longing to return to a homeland (Armenia and Iran), and their multiple collective consciousnesses, particularly the shared memories of the 1915 genocide. I also provide examples from cultural productions which demonstrate the diasporic transnationalism of Iranian Armenian authors who maintain ties with their homeland while are simultaneously anchored and settled in their host nations.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"81 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45036667","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":"Echoes of the Past: Egyptian Student Activists between Revolution, Repression and Memory of the Student Movement","authors":"Farah Ramzy","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2030983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2030983","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 Based on an extensive ethnographic field study among various groups of student activists, this article questions how the memory of historical student protests, namely of 1946 and 1972, is being actualized during student mobilizations after the revolution, especially in the post-2013 repressive context. Focusing on contentious repertoires as the incarnation of memory politics, this article shows how the historical student movement stands for a pool of contentious performances as well as a long standing mnemonic frame of the ‘role’ students should play in society. It then suggests that this past is read through the lens of the ongoing revolution of 2011, and later of the impeding repression. At the same time, the past also weighs in the process of understanding, dealing with and defining one’s place in the present moment whether in terms of actors’ strategies, priorities, ambitions or survival tactics in times of repression. Finally, this article concludes with a preliminary reflection on the potential channels transferring the memory of the student movement, namely, the revolutionary moment, the pre-revolutionary contentious mobilizations, the ‘national historiography’ and Social Media.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"41 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42486705","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 the White Man’s Burden to the Responsible Saviour: Justifying Humanitarian Intervention in Libya","authors":"Ilia Xypolia","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2030981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2030981","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the political nature of human rights as well as intense debate over the precise nature of Western biases in the whole project. Spurred by the fresh renewal of radical theory, a growing body of literature explores the role that racialized power hierarchies have played in the human rights project through the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. Drawing from critical human rights scholarship, this article explores the way human rights have been employed as a legitimising discourse for justifying military intervention in Libya. In doing so, it illustrates the Eurocentric conceptualisation of power, power hierarchies and subjectivities.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47743010","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}