With twelve chapters authored by forty-seven of the field’s leading scholars The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings (PSME), edited by Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, and Sean Yom, offers the most comprehensive and nuanced balance-sheet to date on how MENA politics researchers have fared in responding to salient questions brought to the fore by the Arab Uprisings. Far from a self-congratulatory display of the field’s accomplishments, the book is full of critical insights regarding various research programs’ contributions and where each of them could improve and grow.
Ten of PSME’s chapters trace the evolution of research production across a range of topics, including authoritarianism (Chapter 2), protests (Chapter 3), international relations (Chapter 4), militaries and political violence (Chapter 5), political economy and development (Chapter 6), Islam and Islamism (Chapter 7), identity and sectarianism (Chapter 8), public opinion (Chapter 9), migration and displacement (Chapter 10), and local politics (Chapter 11). Coauthored by a generationally diverse group of three to six scholars, each chapter takes stock of decades worth of literature, assesses recent research trends, and identifies promising lines of inquiry for future research. The chapters also describe pressing methodological, theoretical, ethical, or logistical challenges confronting researchers across the said fields. An introductory chapter by coeditor Marc Lynch sets the context for these contributions by overviewing the evolution of Middle East political science before and after the Arab Uprisings, noting the field’s sometimes-fraught relationship with the rest of the discipline. A final chapter by Lisa Anderson situates the book’s cross-cutting themes vis-à-vis the ethical and professional difficulties MENA political scientists face, whether in their fieldwork or in managing their tense relationship with centers of powers.
The book brings to light a wealth of empirical trends inviting further study. Chapter 2, authored by André Bank et al., notes the rising prevalence of personalist authoritarianism (p. 41), as well as the growing involvement of regional powers in propping up authoritarian regimes outside their own borders (pp. 51-2). Variation in military establishments’ responses to the Arab Uprisings in different countries, Holger Albrecht et al. postulate in Chapter 5, reflect divergences in both experiences of state formation and modes of economic development (p. 114). Since the Uprisings, according to May Darwich and the coauthors of Chapter 4, the foreign policies of small states, the dynamics of proxy wars, and alliance formation patterns in the Middle East have been at odds with a host of international relations theories (pp. 96-7).
One distinguishing feature of PSME is a commitment to rethinking the conceptual foundations of existing research approaches, often in ways that speak to political science communities outside of Middle East Studies.
In Chapter 8, Fanar Haddad and his coauthors provide an incisive critique of the common practice of treating sectarian identity as an all-encompassing static trait with an exaggerated explanatory power (p. 183). Such an approach, they argue, tends to say less about the empirical realities on the ground and more about a given project’s misguided (and dangerously essentialist) assumptions about the allegedly limitless power of sectarian cleavages (p. 197). These rigid conceptions of sectarianism, moreover, preclude important lines of inquiry, including how sectarian affinities form, evolve, and decline across time (pp. 198-9).
In a similar vein, Janine Clark et al. push against conceptualizing local politics as a constellation of “subnational” units whose primary purpose is to provide controlled comparisons for testing and developing theories about the workings of national-level politics (Chapter 11). Instead, local politics must be viewed as a site of political contestation worthy of study on its own terms and not reduced to a petri dish of insights for understanding national politics (p. 258).
Echoing increasing calls in the field for more inclusive (and non-Westcentric) conceptions of “security,” Darwich et al. challenge international relations scholars to tackle a critical question the field has largely ignored: “security for (and according to) whom” (pp. 98-100)?
On a different level, PSME illustrates how novel data have helped shape new lines of inquiry after the Arab Uprisings. For instance, access to qualitative and quantitative data on protests, Nermin Allam and her collaborators indicate, injected new energies into the study of contentious politics in the MENA, allowing scholars to examine the determinants, dynamics, and effects of protests (Chapter 3). Unlike past research that treated protests as mere markers of cycles of contention, MENA politics scholars are now pursuing a deeper interest in the act of protest itself, bringing to focus previously understudied phenomena, such as the role of emotions and affect in mobilization (pp. 63, 69). Ferdinand Eibl et al. point out in Chapter 6 that in the field of political economy, improvements in firm-level data from various countries opened opportunities for measuring the effects of “political overhead” on the success of private sector enterprises (Chapter 6, p. 142). Expansions in Arab world survey research, Lindsay Benstead and her coauthors show, yielded a host of new findings on popular conceptions of democracy, the determinants of support for Islamist parties, and the relationship between religiosity and views on gender relations (Chapter 9).
While PSME frames the Arab Uprisings as a transformative moment in the history of research production on MENA, contributors acknowledge that many recent scholarly advancements were grounded in literatures and research efforts predating the uprisings. In some cases, newer contributions nuanced or refined prior theories without necessarily overturning them. For instance, as Tarek Masoud et al. point out in Chapter 7, the Uprisings pushed scholars to revisit “Islamist moderation” hypotheses and longstanding debates on the determinants of Islamist groups’ electoral success. In the field of political economy, post-Uprisings research added greater depth to the established literature on “rentier state theory” (Chapter 6, pp. 144-5). In other words, the knowledge accumulated before the Arab Uprisings is anything but irrelevant to contemporary research efforts. In fact, some PSME contributors warn of the pitfalls of treating the Arab Uprisings as a clean break from the past. Rawan Arar and the coauthors of Chapter 10 critique the “presentist bias” in some recent analyses on migration and displacement, many of which overlook the historical dimensions of post-Uprisings patterns of population movement (p. 233).
Inevitably, some readers will question PSME’s choice of chapter themes and whether they adequately do justice to all relevant research trends in the field. On this count, the contributors themselves proceed with humility, acknowledging the inherent limitations and tradeoffs of any such choice (Chapter 7, pp. 159, 284).
Regardless of what the volume may have missed by ways of themes or citations, the key argument in PSME’s is delivered very persuasively: Regional expertise was evidently a decisive factor in realizing MENA political science’s theoretical gains during the last several decades. It is in that sense that PSME is more than just a chronology of the field’s scholarship; PSME is an argument about how knowledge production and theoretical innovations occur. Specifically, connecting these diverse chapters is a broader narrative about how regional studies—once dismissed by some as an ineffective approach to studying politics—not only contributed to what we know today about the workings of important political phenomena; it led the way in many respects. For example, Lynch reminds us, rather diplomatically, that attempts by non-regional specialists to theorize the Arab Uprisings and politics surrounding them have largely faltered and that “the more enduring contributions mostly came from those with real area studies expertise” (p. 28).
More than that, the profound impact of inter-disciplinary exchanges within Middle East Studies on the literatures reviewed in PSME is quite clear. Clark and her collaborators, for example, attribute newer innovations in the study of local politics in MENA political science to “the growth of interdisciplinary approaches, particularly the spatial turn in MENA studies” and the “cross-fertilization between political science, urban studies, anthropology, sociology, and geography” (p. 257). While the contributions of inter-disciplinary approaches are not equally apparent across chapters, most of them acknowledge them implicitly by citing work from other disciplines. More significantly, PSME itself embodies that inter-disciplinary spirit to the extent that a few of its chapters are coauthored by scholars affiliated with disciplines outside of political science. This is all to say that PSME not only refutes the once prevalent view that area expertise and regional studies are dying currencies in political science; it shatters it into pieces.
