Pomeps Conversations

Adria Lawrence speaks about about the recent elections in Morocco on this week's POMEPS podcast with Marc Lynch, "The outcome isn't really surprising, though very few people expected a big surprise. The PJD [Party of Justice and Development, a moderate Islamist-oriented party] took more seats than its rival." Adria Lawrence is Associate Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Her research reflects her expertise in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. "It was probably quite expected for the PJD to continue its prior mandate for the last five years with a majority of seats in the parliament," Lawrence says. "Secularists were worried about what an Islamist party would do, but the PJD hasn't pushed for that much of an Islamist agenda." In fact, Lawrence says, the PJD has not accomplished a lot in the last five years. They "haven't managed to make major steps forward on their major platforms, like corruption. They've had some

In this week's POMEPS conversation, Marc Lynch speaks with David Patel about the borders of the Middle East and the legacy of Sykes–Picot. "When Westerners talk about reimagining the borders of the Middle East, what they're thinking of is smaller states." But, says Patel, "we should be careful when we talk about 'reimagining the borders.'" Patel is a lecturer in the department of politics and senior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Looking at the rhetoric of Sykes-Picot. "ISIS isn't a secessionist movement. It's not trying to break away from Iraq or Syria. ISIS talks about Sykes–Picot and the conspiracy of it." "People don't know what to call ISIS now. Calling it a 'state,' even if it dies and becomes a 'failed state,' is a political statement. But it's been there for three years, governing lives... you can travel from one end of the Islamic State to the other with a piece of paper that says, 'This person is allowed to transport agricultural goods. Those ar

The 1970s was a pivotal time for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. In this week's POMEPS Conversations podcast, Salim Yaqub talks about how that decade was the most influential time for the emergence of the Arab world as a major player in international politics — a topic he explores in depth in his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans and Arabs in the 1970s. "As a historian, I'm often reluctant to opine too directly on what's going on today," Yaqub says. "If you want to understand the course that U.S.-Arab relations have taken— that curious state of affairs — you have to take a look at what happened in the 1970s. " "Geopolitical developments that generate ill will between the two societies [in the 1970s], also at the same time create possibilities for better relations and for more favorable perspectives. It plays itself out in the petrodollars story, but also in Arab-Israeli diplomacy," Yaqub says. Yaqub is a professor at UC Santa Barbara, and directs UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and Intern

Local Palestinian elections across the West Bank and Gaza were scheduled to take place next month, but they have been suspended. On this week's POMEPS podcast, scholar Diana Greenwald explains that, while elections are frequently canceled or postponed in the Palestinian territories, "This was set to be a significant one because both Fatah and Hamas were set to compete against each other for the first time since 2006." "It's largely being seen by observers as a means by Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank, to postpone— or even cancel— this vote to avoid an embarrassing loss at the polls." Greenwald is a doctoral student in comparative politics at the University of Michigan where she focuses on the politics of revenue mobilization in transitional settings, including new states, aspiring states, and conflict/post-conflict states. Greenwald was a 2012 recipient of our POMEPS Travel-Research-Engagement grant. "We can't look to local elections as a driver of change at a larger level in the conditions of t

Next week, Jordan is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections. Coming in the midst of intense economic challenges and security fears, the vote will be the first held under a new electoral law, and the first contested by multiple Islamist movements. On POMEPS Conversation #82, Marc Lynch speaks with Curtis Ryan, author of Jordan in Transition: From Hussein To Abdullah, to preview those elections and their potential significance.

"Sectarianism tends to internally fracture societies. It's extremely dangerous," says Raymond Hinnebusch. "Compare that to the way pan-Arabism was used to integrate the various Arabic speaking minorities who previously felt excluded, but if Arab identity was the common identity, it didn't matter if you were a Sunni or Shia, an Alawite or Druze, you were included in the community." Marc Lynch speaks with Hinnebusch about international relations in the Middle East and emerging sectarianism in the region. Hinnebusch is a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews. "People have many identities and sect may only be one of them. For quite a long time, people embraced Arab nationalism as an inclusive identity," says Ray Hinnebusch. But what went wrong in the Middle East to see the rise of sectarianism we see today? "If you got a similar situation to what we had in Iraq— namely, people in a failed state where people can't depend on the state for security so they fall back on their

"If you compare the Egyptian military and the Tunisian military, obviously these are two very different institutions from and organizational perspective, but also their understanding of their political role." Kevin Koehler says. "The Egyptian military sees itself as a political institution and has a history of this in their country, which is not true in the same extent for the Tunisian military." On this week's podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Kevin Koehler about the role of militaries in Middle East governments and how political scientists study Arab military. Koehler is an assistant professor at the department of political science at the American University in Cairo. Koehler also speaks about his research interviewing the Syrian army deserters. "One of the main conclusions which came out of this is that the level of control and supervision— even in the context of the ongoing civil war— is extraordinary, relative to other militaries and what common sense explanations would suggest about what drives deserti

Critical analysis of Tunisia and the Ennahdha party by Monica Marks. Marks is an Oxford PhD candidate, Rhodes Scholar and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Despite the shift Ennahdha has made from Islamism. Marks argues it is a formalization of already-held beliefs. "Ennahdha has a higher objectives- based view of how religion should inform politics. The idea is that the principles can give shape and purpose to policies but that shari'a and Islam do not offer a policy handbook. This is not a new development for Ennahdha. "We should questions terms like 'secularism,' 'post-Islamism,' and 'Islamism' itself— and to what extent they really even apply to the actors we look at. Because Ennahdha is inhabiting a politics place where separating religion and politics is not truly possible in the way Western liberals might conceive it." Marks says that regional context is important to understanding Ennahdha. "The Egypt coup exacerbated re-exsisting patterns of compromise inside Ennahdha.

André Bank, a senior research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), talks about how Jordan is dealing with the influx of Syrian refugees by looking at how Jordanians perceive the Syrian crisis and how it shapes their political economies. "Jordan is doing a relatively good job with the Syrian refugees when compared to Lebanon or northern Iraq." However, Banks says, "The Jordanian state still upholds the image that the Syrians ultimately will return....though it seems as though the Syrians will be there for the longterm, so solutions will need to be found." "We've visited schools and seen some resentment from Jordanians— the school teachers now have to teach double shifts— it's usually the case that Jordanian kids go in the morning and Syrian kids go in the afternoon for three hours — if the go at all. Roughly half of Syrian kids go to Jordanian schools." This resentment has bonded Jordanians of different heritage. "When you look at this historically, in the mid-2000s, with an i

We hear from Wendy Pearlman, an associate professor in the department of political science at Northwestern University. Pearlman has carried out open-ended interviews with displaced Syrians since 2012. "Like many people watching the Syrian uprising from afar, I was fascinated of the individual-level experience of what this must have been like for Syrians who went out into the streets, what drove them to do so, what drove them to stay. How people were experiencing protest, how people were experiencing violence. How people ultimately fled the country as refugees. I decided there was no better way to understand that lived experience— the personal experience of dramatic political phases— than to get to individuals themselves and ask them to tell me their stories." "For the most part, it's not that the people are telling the same anecdote. They're telling very different anecdotes of their own personal experiences. They'll tell personal stories of their childhood under Assad's Syria, and when they went to their f

On this week's POMEPS Conversation podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Social Sciences Department at Lebanese American University. "Many countries are becoming like Lebanon where people start thinking of sectarian/tribal/ethnic divisions and identities as primordial. And then the only way to get out of the conflict is through the institutionalization of these identities into a new, power-sharing pact. But what that does is to freeze these identities and make it very difficult to move away from." "At the end of the day, the major problem is that people start looking at these identities as primordial. And they start behaving as if these identities have always been with us as part of these ancient hatreds. It becomes very difficult to come up with a counter-narrative."

On this week's POMEPS Conversation podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Daniel Corstange, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Corstange talks about his current research, which focuses on gathering data from Syrian refugees. "You can think of a lot of different stories we tell ourselves about why there's a war going on. And it doesn't seem to be the case that any of them are the true story." "So we're trying to understand why people think this is happening. There are actually very interesting patterns about why people think one thing versus another thing." "This is an existential crisis for a lot of people. It's completely destroyed their lives at home. They are picking up the pieces elsewhere — sometimes they haven't even been able to pick up the pieces. But it's not the case that they've managed to get across the border and they can shut off what's happening in the civil war."

On this week's POMEPS Conversation podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Pete Moore about the political economy and refugees in Jordan. Moore is an associate professor of political science and director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science at Case Western University. Looking at how past events influence current relationships, Moore says, "What we see today in terms of the U.S. role in Jordan was incubated in the early 80s vis-à-vis the Iran-Iraq war." By the 1990s, "Jordan was caught between the demands of the U.S. regarding sanctions, but is stuck with of a transport sector and industrial sector that was wedded to Iraq and does not want to see that relationship weaken." Moore says, "The regime wanted to hold on to those linkages...after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, those relationships will be looked at less in an economic realm and more in the security realm." "It takes the monarchy a long time, but essentially they vote to let die that industry and transport sector. And that's one of

On this week's POMEPS Conversation Podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Sune Haugbølle. Haugbølle is an associate professor at Roskilde University, and much of his research focuses on Leftist movements in the Middle East. "Before the Arab uprisings, I had a sense for a long time that there's a real gap in the historiography of the modern Middle East. Leftists groups,"Haugbølle says, "Have really been understudied. There's a lot we don't know about them— and I think that lack of knowledge came from the notion that somehow the left had ceased to be important." "I'm trying to see what the historical memory of failures and trasitions of the Left in the last couple of decades means today for the Leftist activitists, militants, intellectuals today," says Haugbølle. "The history of the Arab Left is global." In today's world, Haugbølle argues, "The new Left is a fragmented field of smaller movements. It's by definition a vast array of influences." "Obviously the Middle East is not in the throes of the American homogen

On this week's POMEPS Conversation podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Vickie Langohr about public sexual harassment faced by women in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. Langohr is an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross, focusing on Middle East politics, nationalism and democratization. "Egyptians will often tell you that several decades ago, [sexual harrasment] was not something that was happening a lot. But we have data from 2008 — before the revolution — that shows pretty close to the same number of women polled saying they experienced harassment even on a daily basis." "Public sexual harassment has become an issue of 20 or 30-somethings is because they're in public more, particularly in protests. I do think there is a generational angle to it." Langohr said a lot of sexual harassment happens on crowded subways. "Any time there's mass crowding on public transit, sexual harassment increases." Langohr spoke with young Egyptians about their political involvement. "In the interviews I've d

On this week's POMEPS podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Reinoud Leenders about the origins of the Syrian conflict. Leenders is a reader in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. "In the beginning, it was a question of who would move first, and where." Leenders says. "Why it happened in certain places and not others, it is because of local characteristics." Aleppo, Leenders says, held back. "It was a very conservative, middle class [place] that felt it was too much to get involved and put a stop on mobilization initially." "In hindsight, lots of people have said it was a mistake of the [Syrian] regime to have applied such vast levels of repression," Leenders said. "But I think that, beyond moral considerations, I don't think the repression as such was a mistake...The brutality of the regime touched on some really sensitive registers, include dignity and honor of women." Even as Leenders's research focuses on the parsing out the conflict through the lens of two narratives, "We are five years

Charles Kurzman speaks with Marc Lynch about how past failed mobilizations can explain the challenges facing the Middle East after the 2011 uprisings. Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. "There's the sense of disillusionment when things don't turn out well. The hopes and dreams that come crumbling down when the new institutions turn out not what you thought they ought to be. We saw this in Iran, when a huge portion of the population that was so active in bringing down the shah, then feels that their revolution was hijacked. This new Islamic Republic doesn't represent what they meant at all. We see it again after the uprisings of the Arab Spring; huge portions of the populations saying, 'No, no. This isn't what we wanted.'"

Saudi Arabia is facing challenges: the global oil slump, the future of the GCC's collective stability and its intervention in Yemen. "Yemen was the place they decided to strike back," Greg Gause tells Marc Lynch in this latest POMEPS podcast. "I think both because they've always seen it as their backyard — part of their special preserve — where they were least likely to directly confront the Iranians. You do something like they're doing in Syria, and you're fighting the Iranians directly." There are signs, Gause says, that an end may be in sight. "The fact there was a Houthi delegation in Riyadh in April show that those in charge are looking for an exit ramp." Saudi Arabia's economic challenges lie beyond low oil prices. "The Saudi private sector has been a job creating machine in the last decade. It's just that almost all of those jobs have gone to foreigners...the real core of this how do you make it so Saudi private sector hire more Saudis without destroying the business model they've created. I don't s

"The crisis in Turkey has been a long time coming," Kristin Fabbe says about the current political situation in Turkey. Fabbe, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, speaks with Marc Lynch on this week's POMEPS podcast about the "very scary" climate in Turkey. "There was this key moment between the first election in 2015 and the second, and what happened in between those two elections was very scary for Turkish politics. You see this bombings in Ankara and then members of the AKP get up and say, 'This happened because there was no government. This did not happen on our watch.' They use the fact they lost control of the parliament... to basically say, 'You're better off under our thumb.'" Their conversation looks at how President Erdogan is leading his party in the midst of terrorism and the refugee crisis, their economic situation, and Turkey's relationship with the European Union. "Turkish democracy does better when Turkey is engaged with Europe. When Turkey is disengaged, Turkish democrac

Marc Lynch speaks with Rory McCarthy about Tunisia's Ennahda party, and its transition through the uprisings to present day.