Egypt’s Generals and Transnational Capital
Horizontalism in the Egyptian Revolutionary Process
A number of academics, commentators and activists have noted the presence of what one might call “horizontalism” in the Egyptian revolutionary process that started on January 25, 2011: the decentralized or networked form of organizing; the leaderless protest movements; the eschewal of top-down command; the deliberative, rather than representative, democracy; the emphasis on participation, creativity and consensus; the opposition to dogma and sectarianism, often associated with older generations; and new links, respectful of diversity and often youth-inspired, between formerly sharply opposed political currents.
The Local Politics of the Lebanese Disappeared
The Syrian presence in Lebanon was visible and audible to all, from the large numbers of Syrian construction workers to the peddlers selling the latest music CDs on the sidewalks to the military checkpoints in the mountains. In shared taxis there was often talk about which Lebanese politician had just returned from Syria, along with parodies of Syrian Arabic dialect and jokes about Lebanese men going to Syria for what they called a bicycle ride — a visit to a prostitute. A parallel social hierarchy separated those who could use the military lane to cross the border into Syria and those who had to wait sometimes long hours in regular lanes.
From the Editors (Spring 2012)
Are the upheavals in the Arab world revolutions? Uprisings? Revolts?
Perhaps all these terms are misnomers, because they imply an end point, a moment when the event will be over, its historical task finished, if not completed. It is increasingly apparent, however, that the Arab world is witnessing not discrete events, but the advent of a new era in which participatory politics has taken on much more immediate relevance. No end point has come into view — and none is necessary.
Editor’s Picks (Winter 2011)
Aloni, Udi. What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Bier, Laura. Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Booth, Ken and Tim Dunne. Terror in Our Time (London: Routledge, 2011).
Center for American Progress. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in the United States (Washington, DC, August 2011).
Cook, Steven. The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
New Insights into Libyan History
Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation: Colonial Legacy, Exile and the Emergence of a New Nation-State (Oxford: Routledge, 2010).
With the fall of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011, his paranoid and largely successful attempts to close off contemporary Libyan history to academic inquiry have presumably also come to an end. Over the next several years, there is every reason to anticipate a flowering of scholarship utilizing Libya’s untapped archival resources. The authors of these yet-to-be-written studies would be wise to root themselves in the work of the few Western scholars who were productively operating in Libya prior to the collapse of Qaddafi’s regime.
The September 11 Effect on Anthropology
Conventional wisdom among scholars of the Middle East is that the September 11, 2001 attacks left behind a threatening professional environment. Graduate students and faculty alike speak of hostile infiltrators in their classrooms, inevitably bitter tenure battles and the self-censorship that both can produce. At the same time, in the aftermath of September 11 Middle East scholars anticipated that the perennially spotty job market might improve.
Gender and Revolution in Egypt
Gaza’s Tunnel Complex
For an informal smuggling route, the tunnel complex underneath Gaza’s border with Egypt is remarkably formal. A security cordon of chicken-wire fencing surrounds the Gazan side of the site, barring entrance from Rafah town a few hundred meters away. At each exit a squad in military fatigues monitors the round-the-clock traffic for blacklisted goods. At one checkpoint, Hamas security men frisked a youth in jeans and a baggy T-shirt, discovering a colored paper bag taped to his waist. Inside were 16 packets of tramadol, an opioid painkiller that can be purchased over the counter in Egypt but is sold by the pill in Gaza. The young man’s stash would have fetched 6,000 shekels (over $1,600) on the streets.
The Illegal Oil Trade Along Turkey’s Borders
Lampedusa
More than 52,000 would-be migrants have landed on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011. Roughly half of the arrivals are young Tunisian men looking for job opportunities in Europe. Most of the others are Sahelians, sub-Saharan Africans or South Asians fleeing the violence in Libya. In many cases, they were forced onto boats by Libyan soldiers, as part of the “invasion” Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi promised should his rule come under NATO attack. [1] The staggering number of arrivals does not include the estimated 1,500 who starved, suffocated or drowned in the central Mediterranean trying to reach Europe’s nearest shore.
The Clandestine Central Mediterranean Passage
About 78 nautical miles separate the Tunisian town of al-Huwariyya at the head of the Cap Bon peninsula from Capo Feto at the southwestern tip of Sicily. An Italy-bound voyage between the two points, on the straight line headed roughly northeast-east, takes about 13 hours at an average speed of six knots under sail. A speedboat moving at 30-45 knots would traverse the same distance in about two hours.
Europe’s Border Control with a Humanitarian Face
Extra-Legality
A large, sinister pair of eyes stares out from the cover of the February 2011 Wired magazine, above the heading “The Underworld Exposed.” The rest of the face is darkened, melding with the shadows. At the top of the shadows reside the words “Counterfeit Ferraris, Sex Syndicates, Darknets, Secret Societies and More!” At the bottom, between “The Nine All-Time Greatest Cons” and “What’s Inside Heroin”: “How to Buy a Kidney, p. 112.”
Was the Libya Intervention Necessary?
The death of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi has become one of the most contested moments of Libya’s eight-month war. The exact circumstances of the colonel’s demise on October 20 are unclear, but evidence is mounting that Libya’s former ruler was killed — extra-judicially executed — by the band of young gunmen who captured him.
From the Editor (Winter 2011)
A question nagged at Occupy Wall Street and its myriad imitators, the most exciting social movement to emanate from the United States in more than a decade, for much of the fall. “What are your demands?” journalists persisted in asking. “What do you want?”
Letter (Fall 2011)
Rochelle Davis’ “Culture as a Weapon” (MER 255) presents the wrong question, answered incorrectly. In her piece the US military appears both incapable of teaching service members to interact with civilians and unworthy of making such attempts. Davis concludes that military efforts at understanding culture to aid military decisions represent a “gentler face of violent imperial policies that envision invasions and occupations as justified, sustainable and ethical.” The US Army’s approach is not that simple.
Editor’s Picks (Fall 2011)
Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
B’tselem. Dispossession and Exploitation: Israel’s Policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea (Jerusalem, May 2011).
Dalacoura, Katerina. Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Davidson, Christopher. The Persian Gulf and Pacific Asia: From Indifference to Interdependence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Haddad, Fanar. Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Kuran, The Long Divergence
Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, 2011).
Readers looking at the title of Timur Kuran’s new book might be forgiven for thinking it had come from some pre-Orientalism time warp where it was still possible to make essentialist generalizations about Islamic law and Middle Eastern backwardness. And they would be mostly correct.
Media Wars and the Gulen Factor in the New Turkey
