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JournalISSN: 1083-4753

Arab Studies Journal 

About: Arab Studies Journal is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Ideology. It has an ISSN identifier of 1083-4753. Over the lifetime, 145 publications have been published receiving 1244 citations.


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Journal Article
TL;DR: Weizman's work as discussed by the authors traces the history of humanitarians' adoption of the principle of the least-worst-possible-evil, which is defined as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited.
Abstract: THE LEAST OF ALL POSSIBLE EVILS: HUMANITARIAN VIOLENCE FROM ARENDT TO GAZA by Eyal Weizman New York: Verso, 2011 (218 pages, index, illustrations) $26.95 (cloth)In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to keep Americans safe, it would be a justiflable lesser evil in the service of national security. Nowadays, drone strikes have supplanted torture as the popular lesser evil.Eyal Weizman begins The Least of All Possible Evils with a history of lesser-evil thinking. "The principle of the lesser evil," he explains,is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. ... Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. (6)Weizman's work is a profound and empirically rich engagement with developments in contemporary "humanitarianism," which, he argues, has evolved into various technocratic collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those who mete out state violence in the name of security. He names this lesser-evil collusion "the humanitarian present."Weizman dates the start of the humanitarian present to the 1980s, specifically the "humanitarian crisis" in Ethiopia and the role Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) played there. The "crisis" was not the devastating famine in East Africa. It was rather the ways in which Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime co-opted MSF's relief work to seize and relocate starving people who came from rebel-controlled regions to the food distribution centers, ultimately leading to thousands of deaths.Weizman traces the contemporary history of humanitarianism to French left-radical politics in the late 1960s and the influence of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Anti-totalitarianism supplanted revolutionary leftism, and activism shifted from proletariats and capitalists to the "passive quasi-religious dialectics of victims and perpetrators" (37). This elevation of victims as the focus of humanitarian concern and action congealed as a politics of compassion and a practice oriented to the humanitarian culture of emergency. The humanitarian ethic, in the words of Bernard-Henri Levy, was the utilitarian objective to "make the world a little more livable for the greatest number of people" (38). The nexus of compassion and practice found its infrastructure in humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, such as MSF.The logic of principled compromises can be seen in MSF's promotion of "humanitarianism in its minimalist form, ... as the practice of 'lesser evils' ... [to sustain] life without seeking to govern or manage populations, [or to make] political claims on their behalf, [or to seek] to resolve root causes of conflicts" (54). Weizman compares this willingness to compromise for the goal of keeping people alive to that of the world's most preeminent humani- tarian organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, where access to prisoners is traded for the promise not to publicize what is learned.Such political agnosticism involved a three-part move: creating humani- tarian spaces separate from the political spheres of armies or regimes, adhering to a logic of humanitarian minimalism to sustain life, and believing that the people whose lives were saved would create their own politics, someday. …

128 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Al-Rasheed as discussed by the authors explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in Saudi Arabia and explores the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere.
Abstract: A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia will become an essential reference for discussions of what the author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls "the globalized question of Saudi women" (26). Saudi women are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on the ban on driving, this book explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in the Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as the state makes their subordination possible at the legal, social, political, and economic levels.Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring "the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion" in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role in denying Saudi women a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with the expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi women to be present and active in the public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety "through daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization" (2).Acknowledging pioneering texts in the study of gender in Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon the work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap in the growing literature by placing gender in Saudi Arabia in relation to the state and religious nationalism. She formulates the concept of "religious nationalism" in conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, "fail to account for the imaging of Saudi Arabia" (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was "invented" by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, "the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply the Sharia in all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic ethos" (14). Citing the work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts the case of the Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed women to benefit in certain legal aspects while "projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects" (17). In the Saudi kingdom, religious nationalism involved breaking the military and political autonomy of the tribes, even as it drew upon the tribal ethos to keep "women in a patriar- chal relationship under the authority of male relatives" (5). By looking at both secular and religious nationalisms in the region and their relation to modernity, mostly through the prism of their discourses of women's rights, Al-Rasheed shows how "in both cases, women are turned into symbols, representing anything but themselves" (17).In the Saudi kingdom, a limited women's presence indicates the nation's obedience to Islamic law. Al-Rasheed surveys a number of Saudi fatwas on women in the 1980s whose restrictive interpretations of Islam, she shows, were used by the state to further limit women's visibility in the public space. The religious 'ulama' have also emphasized women's "emotionality" to deem them incapable of serving in state positions and public offices. This narra- tive was further used to make the subordination of Saudi women possible in legal, social, and religious terms. In order to control their appearance and mobility, women's bodies were referred to as sources of fitna (which the author translates as "chaos" rather than "temptation").According to Al-Rasheed, Saudi women face a "double exclusion"- "one in the general economy and one in the domestic sphere" (23). …

65 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Masoud's approach fits best with that of the materialists, but he seeks to improve upon their lack of empirical evidence and their failure to account for the trajectories of Islamists' leftist opponents as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: COUNTING ISLAM: RELIGION, CLASS, AND ELECTIONS IN EGYPT Tarek Masoud New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (xxii + 276 pages, bibliography, index) $3499 (paper)In Counting Islam, Tarek Masoud asks how Islamists have performed in Egyptian electoral politics, both under authoritarianism and in their sweeping victories in the democratic elections that followed the overthrow of Husni Mubarak in 2011 In particular, he hopes to solve the puzzle of why impoverished Egyptians chose the economically conservative party of the Muslim Brotherhood over leftists with redistributive politics Masoud challenges two prevailing perspectives on Islamist popularity Ideational approaches consider the discursive advantage Islamists have among Muslim constituents, but neglect variation in their electoral success and tend to essentialize Islam Materialist approaches have theorized about Islamists' abilities in service provision and superior organization and discipline Masoud's approach fits best with that of the materialists, but he seeks to improve upon their lack of empirical evidence and their failure to account for the trajectories of Islamists' leftist opponents Islamists, he argues, have a critical resource advantage: they are "embedded" in the religious institutions that predominate Egypt's "associational landscape" and facilitate communication with voters Leftists, in contrast, are not well organized into unions or other collectives; economic underdevelopment-poverty, limited industrialization, and an extensive informal sector-has marginalized their role in the civic sphere Thus, economic structures shape social and political institutions through which parties communicate with voters; rational voters, in turn, choose the parties they perceive to be materially rewarding In Masoud's explanation of the trajectories of parties from across the Egyptian political spectrum, underdevelopment and materialism trump popular religiosity and ideasMasoud demonstrates this argument first by looking at elections under the authoritarian National Democratic Party (NDP), which used state resources to win and maintain the support of the mass of poor voters That is, the left's otherwise natural constituency was choosing immediate material interests over ideology-as evidenced in the relationship between illiteracy and NDP support, for instance The regime also designed electoral institutions that disadvantaged leftists and other opposition groups, notably the "winner-takes-all" open nomination system that favored independent candidates over organized partiesOne of the book's primary objectives is to establish that, in this context, the Brotherhood developed a middle-class constituency The Brotherhood was never the party of the poor Masoud's creativity in measurement is on full display in these passages He uses original data at the electoral and administrative district level to show that the Muslim Brotherhood was more likely to field candidates in affluent areas He uses the staggering number of its web pages and the extent of Internet searches for the Brotherhood as indicators of the high education and income levels of its activists and supporters The cleverest measure appears in a test of the group's historical mobilization among the middle classes Lacking even indirect indicators of socioeconomic status from the 1930s, Masoud uses the rate of blindness (usually brought on by impoverished living conditions) as a proxy for poverty, revealing that more blindness was related to the absence of Brotherhood branches in districts across the countryTurning to the post-uprising democratic setting, Masoud asks the critical question of why poor voters chose this conservative and rightist group The left had gained prominence during the revolution, the slogan of which was "bread, freedom, and social justice!" Public opinion polls indicated that the majority of Egyptians prioritized the economy on the eve of the 2011 elections …

51 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Following in the footsteps of international organizations, including the United Nations, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the International Telecommunications Union, on 2 May 2013, Google replaced the words "Palestinian Territories" with "Palestine" on all of its sites and products as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Following in the footsteps of international organizations, including the United Nations, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the International Telecommunications Union, on 2 May 2013, Google replaced the words "Palestinian Territories" with "Palestine" on all of its sites and products. Israeli deputy foreign minister Ze'ev Elkin immediately sent a letter to Google's CEO urging him to reconsider the decision that "in essence recogniz[es] the existence of a Palestinian state."1 It was not the first time that an Israeli official took issue with "Palestine" emerging as a recognized entity in the virtual world. In 1998, for example, Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, personally lobbied the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) against its decision to award Palestinians an international telephone code. He claimed, in terms echoed fifteen years later in the Google com- motion, that Palestine is "not a territorial or geopolitical entity," and that the "insistence upon the illegitimate use of the term 'Palestine' is liable to unfairly prejudice the outcome of . . . negotiations [at the time]."2Palestine "exists" on Google and increasingly in various other "virtual" ways. But are "Palestine" on Google or the acquisition of the google.ps domain name in 2009 examples of political resistance on the internet? For Palestinian politicians, virtual presence has historical significance. Consider, for example, the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology's (MTIT) suggestion that "ICTs [information and communica- tions technology] contribute directly to the national goal of establishing and building an independent state."3 Within that context, Sabri Saydam, adviser to Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas and a former MTIT minister himself, posited Google's 2013 move as "a step towards...libera- tion."4 For Israeli politicians, as quoted above, the emergence of (a virtual) "Palestine" poses ideological and practical dangers. Both camps ascribe power to the internet. Their only disagreement is over the ends to which the internet is a means: The internet is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel or a step toward a future state. At heart, however, both views are a form of technological determinism. They remove the internet from human, historical, and geopolitical contexts, and posit it as agent of political, social, or economic change. We contend that neither position is valid.Besides overlooking power relations and on-the-ground dynamics, a technological determinist view is inherently ahistorical. It neither con- textualizes technological change itself nor the rhetoric around it. In the Palestinian case, the belief that new technologies hold within them positive liberatory powers is not new. In the early 1990s, for example, the internet hype came under the guise of connecting Palestinians, regardless of geo- graphic location (in Israel, in the occupied territories, in refugee camps in Lebanon, and farther away in the diaspora), to each other and the world. And as the politicians' statements evidence, the internet emerged for some as an instrument of economic development under the framework of state- building within the occupied territories. At the end of the second intifada in the mid-2000s, scholars, politicians, and investors were still speaking of technology's political promise, now under the framework of user-generated content (web 2.0).5 In tech jargon, web 1.0 indicates one-to-many consump- tion, whereby most users simply download content. Web 2.0 connotes user-created websites, self-publishing platforms, and the many-to-many interactions available through participatory and social networks. The enthusiasm for online activism raises questions about whether new forms of Palestinian political activism are possible thanks to the convergence of physical and virtual worlds, for example through participatory (blogs, wiki), social (Facebook), and geospatial (Foursquare) spaces. …

48 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritatorian Regime by Joseph Sassoon as discussed by the authors was a major contribution to recent scholarship in Iraq's history, politics, culture and economy.
Abstract: SADDAM HUSSEIN'S BA'TH PARTY: INSIDE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME Joseph Sassoon New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (xxi + 314 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations, and map) $29.99 (paper)Despite the attention that Iraq has commanded in the news media and among policymakers since 1990, the country's history, politics, culture, and economy have remained remarkably understudied. This situation is beginning to change, and Joseph Sassoon's Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party represents a major contribution to recent scholarship. Sassoon poses the question of how Saddam Hussein was able to maintain power through two disastrous wars, crippling economic sanctions, and the prolonged and assiduous efforts of the United States to bring him down. Sassoon's book answers this question with the assertion that the Ba'th Party was critical to maintaining the compliance, complicity, cooperation, and support of a significant segment of Iraq's population until the American-led invasion of 2003.Perceptive surveys of Iraq's history such as those by Charles Tripp (A History of Iraq, Cambridge, 2007) and Phebe Marr (The Modern History of Iraq, Westview, 2012) acknowledge that Saddam's regime successfully entangled and implicated many Iraqis in an elaborate system of patronage and surveillance. Sassoon places the Ba'th Party at the center of this enter- prise, looking inside the party to reveal its machinery and its relationship to other institutions of the state. By examining how the regime rewarded its loyalists, he adds a dimension largely absent from Kanan Makiya's The Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California, 1998), which focuses on the regime's repressive capacity. Sassoon's book explores the party's role in cultural production and thereby complements Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California, 2005), which explores the regime's endeavor to maintain itself through crafting a hegemonic worldview to impart to its citizens.Sassoon bases his account on extensive use of Iraqi archival sources, among them textual records of the Iraqi government and audiotapes of meetings between Saddam and his close associates, which the United States seized during its occupation. The documents are now archived at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. A second major collection of archival sources that Sassoon exploited is the Ba'th Party Regional Command documents, also taken to the United States in the wake of the invasion. This collection amounts to some six million pages, which have been digitized and made available to researchers at the Hoover Institute on Stanford University campus. Sassoon also draws upon the records of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by Kurds during the March 1991 uprising in the north of the country. These documents include about 2.4 million pages that are archived in digital form at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to the impressive archival research, Sassoon uses memoirs, Saddam's novels and published speeches, and the Iraqi press. He also interviewed a number of Iraqi officials and military officers who served in the Ba'thist regime.From these sources Sassoon reconstructs how the Iraqi Ba'th Party sustained Saddam's rule and constituted, along with the state bureaucracy and military, one of the three key components of the regime. The party's membership represented a reserve labor force that could be called upon to augment the capacity of the bureaucracy, security forces, and military. We learn that the party was hierarchically organized, hyperregulated, and bureaucratized, but also that it was also capable of fostering initiative and competition among its units. It even devoted considerable attention to conducting elections for the leadership of some levels of the hierarchy. Sassoon traces the lives of party members to demonstrate how party activism was professionalized and constituted a full-time career for Ba'thists in the party's upper echelons. …

47 citations

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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
20193
20186
201718
201631
201518
201420