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340 results in Middle East government, politics and policy

Page 1 of 17

The Rise and Fall of Turkey's Democrat Party
  • The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945–60
  • Reuben Silverman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • More than sixty years after Turkey's Democrat Party was removed from office by a military coup and three of its leaders hanged, it remains controversial. For some, it was the defender of a more democratic political order and founder of a dominant center-right political coalition; for others, it ushered in an era of corruption, religious reaction, and subordination to American influence. This study moves beyond such stark binaries. Reuben Silverman details the party's establishment, development, rule, and removal from power, showing how its leaders transformed themselves from champions of democracy and liberal economics to advocates of illiberal policies. To understand this change, Silverman draws on periodicals and archival documents to detail the Democrat Party's continuity with Turkey's late Ottoman and early republican past as well as the changing nature of the American-led Cold War order in which it actively participated.

The Conquest of the Mountains
  • State Violence, Technology, and Authoritarianism in the Ottoman East
  • Owen Robert Miller
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • In the late summer of 1894, Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered several battalions of Ottoman soldiers to destroy Armenian 'bandits' operating in the remote mountains of Sasun. Over a three-week period, these soldiers systematically murdered men, women, and children, beginning a chain of events which led directly to the Hamidian massacres of 1895 to 1897 and prefigured many patterns of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917. Taking a microhistorical approach, Owen Robert Miller examines how the Ottoman State harnessed three nascent technologies (modern firearms, steamboats, and telegraphs) to centralize authority and envisage new methods of conquest. Alongside developing an understanding of how the violence took place, this study explores how competing narratives of the massacre unfolded and were both disseminated and repressed. Emphasizing the pivotal significance of geography and new technologies, The Conquest of the Mountains reveals how the tragic history of these massacres underscores the development of Ottoman State authoritarianism.

Salafi Political Theology
  • Daniel Lav
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Salafism is a theological movement whose radical wing is today affiliated with al-Qaʿida and the Islamic State, but which draws on precedents stretching back to the medieval theology of Ibn Taymiyya. This innovative study focuses on the concept of theonomy in salafi thought: the tenet that rule by God's law is an essential component of faith, and the corresponding notion that other forms of rule based on human legislation are inherently polytheistic and thereby illegitimate. It is this tenet which furnishes radical militants with their principal casus belli against ruling regimes in the Muslim world. In this book, Daniel Lav details the intellectual grounding for modern salafi theonomy in Ibn Taymiyya's doctrine of tawhid and the writings of the early Wahhabi movement, in addition to the twentieth-century thought of Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi and Sayyid Quṭb, while drawing on insights from comparative political theology to analyze this key school of thought.

Return of Tyranny
  • Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed
  • Killian Clarke
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power. Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though Clarke also identifies a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. By preserving their elite coalitions and broad popular support, these movements can return to mass mobilization to thwart counterrevolutionary threats. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, Return of Tyranny sheds light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics.

Tied Up in Tehran
  • Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran
  • Norma Claire Moruzzi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Tied Up in Tehran offers a richly interdisciplinary study of ordinary life in Iran since the 1979 revolution and a critical intervention in political theory debates on knowledge and method. Drawing from over ten years of field work in Iran since the 1990s, and originating in the author's surreal experience of being served tangerines during a home invasion in Tehran, Norma Claire Moruzzi examines the experiences of women, young people, artists, and activists: at home, at work, and in the street. These stories - of food and family, film and politics, shopping and crime-reckon with the past, demonstrate resilient democratization in the present, and provide glimpses of a plausible future while offering a refreshing model to ethically engaged modes of study. Moruzzi's lucid and engaging writing explores Iranian daily life as unexpected, contradictory, and full of political promise.

Occupier and Occupied
  • Israel, Palestine, and Masculinities across the Divide
  • Chloe Skinner
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Working from the premise that gender and violence are cyclically related, masculinities' connection to power and violence are frequently simplistically assumed. Yet, amid ongoing colonisation and military occupation, there are other more complex dynamics simultaneously at play across Israel and Palestine. In this book, Chloe Skinner explores this, untangling the gendered politics of settler colonialism to shed specific light on the ways in which masculinities shift and morph in this context of colonial violence. Oscillating between analysis of Israeli militarism and military occupation in Palestine, each chapter examines the constitutive performance and negotiation of masculinised ideals across these colonial hierarchies. Masculinities are thus analysed across these settings in connection, rather than in isolation – illustrating that gendered identities, practices, and performances here are intertwined by that which simultaneously divides and separates them: the apartheid politics of the Israeli state.

The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran
  • Power, Institutions, and the Limits of Reform
  • Edited by Hadi Enayat, Mirjam Künkler
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • After Iran's 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini denounced the secular legal system of the Pahlavis and pledged his commitment to distinctly Islamic conceptions of law and justice: the application of both the shariʿa and the rule of law (hākemiyat-e qānun) became major ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic. This precipitated the Islamization of the legal system, the judiciary and the courts, a process which still continues today and is the subject of intense ideological and political contestation. The Rule of Law in Iran is the first comprehensive analysis of judicial and legal institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran in their social, political and historical contexts. Scholars and practitioners of law, many with experience of working in Iran, shed light on how the rule of law has fared across a variety of areas, from criminal law to labour law, family law, minority rights, policing, the legal profession, the visual and performing arts, trade law, and medicine.

Displacement and Erasure in Palestine
  • The Politics of Hope
  • Noa Shaindlinger
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    07 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 August 2023
  • Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state 'buried' histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archival, literary, ethnographic and oral research to engage with ideas of settler colonialism and the production of history, violence and memory, refugee-hood and diaspora.

    This multi-sited study traces Jaffa's refugee experience beyond 1948 to the West Bank and the diaspora in Toronto and Cape Town, re-inscribing the erased experience of Palestinians into an account of Israeli state practices of dispossession. By integrating rigorous archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary and spatial analysis, the book reveals Palestinian's (and their Israeli-Jewish allies') creative responses that challenge displacement and argue for their right to belong to their homeland and their city.

Turkish Paramilitarism in Northern Kurdistan
  • State Violence in the 1990s
  • Ayhan Işık
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    01 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2024
  • This book focuses on paramilitary groups and the Turkish state relations during the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the 1990s. In August 1984, the PKK launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state, leading to a full-blown war throughout the 1990s. During the conflict, the Turkish state established new armed groups, many of them having a paramilitary character. This research investigates the ways in which these paramilitary groups emerged, functioned, and were deactivated. It analyses the historical background, transformations and continuities of these paramilitary groups, and examines their violence against civilians particularly in two regions of Northern Kurdistan: Batman province and Cizre district.

Tehran's Borderlines
  • Urban Development and Public Life in Contemporary Iran
  • Jaleh Jalili
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Tehran has changed in recent decades. Rapid urban development through the expansion of subway lines, highways, bridges, and tunnels, and the emergence of new public spaces have drastically reshaped the physical spaces of Tehran. As the city changes, so do its citizens, their social relations, and their individual and collective perceptions of urban life, class, and culture. Tehran's Borderlines is about the social relations that are interrupted, facilitated, forged, and transformed through processes of urban development. Focusing on the use of public spaces, this book provides an analysis of urban social relations in the context of broader economic, cultural, and political forces. The book offers a narrative of how public spaces function as manifestations of complex relations among citizens of different backgrounds, between citizens and the state, and between forces that shape the physical realities of spaces and the conceptual meanings that citizens create and assign to them.

The New Israelis
  • Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism
  • Alex Weingrod
  • Published online:
    18 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Following successive immigration waves, the military occupation of the West Bank and the emergence of a high-tech based economy, Israeli society has become increasingly complex and divided. In this timely study, Alex Weingrod utilizes ground-breaking ethnographic research to unpack Israel's diverse communities and cultures, arguing that there are several different versions of “being Israeli” that influence and contest with one another. Covering a fascinating range of topics from shifting ethnic group identities to the reinvented Hebrew language and Israeli popular music, Weingrod discusses minority groups including Ethiopian Israelis, the LGBTQ community, migrant workers and the growing, changing Ultra-Orthodox haredi communities alongside Israeli Palestinians who are marginalized and yet resilient. Culminating in an analysis of the unprecedented 2023 political-cultural schism that divided the society between supporters and protesting opponents of government legislation, Weingrod brings the discussion of Israeli divisions, discontents, and paradoxes up to date.

Civic Death in Contemporary Turkey
  • Mass Surveillance and the Authoritarian State
  • Seçkin Sertdemir
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • What does it mean for a government to declare its citizens 'dead' while they still live? Following the failed 2016 coup, the Turkish AKP government implemented sweeping powers against some 152,000 of its citizens. These Kanun hükmünde kararnameli ('emergency decreed') were dismissed from their positions and banned for life from public service. With their citizenship rights revoked, Seçkin Sertdemir argues these individuals were rendered into a state of 'civic death'. This study considers how these authoritarian securitisation methods took shape, shedding light on the lived experiences of targeted people. Bringing together approaches from political philosophy, social anthropology, and sociology, Sertdemir outlines the approaches and justifications used by the Turkish government to dismiss opponents, increase surveillance, and brand citizens as 'terrorists'. At the same time, extensive archival research and in-depth interviews bring focus to the impact of these measures on the lives of women, and the disabled and LGBTQ+ communities.

Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies
  • Job Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman
  • Crystal A. Ennis
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • This book shifts the analysis of economic development in Oman from the traditional focus on oil to the perspective of labour. Focusing on the experiences of workers, jobseekers, and the governance of labour markets, Crystal A. Ennis offers a fresh perspective on regional development and rentier neoliberalism in the Gulf. Highlighting Oman's position within global capitalism, Ennis makes a compelling case for de-exceptionalising the Gulf, arguing that the region's labour markets are global and subject to similar pressures as other global economies. Moving beyond oil also allows Ennis to focus on the social conditions of Oman, where over sixty four percent of the population are under the age of thirty. Ennis offers a rich analysis of historical lineages of labour governance, class formation; and, following protests after 2011 as youth unemployment soared in the region, how authoritarian states react to public pressure and social unrest around perceived economic decline.

Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring
  • A Comparative Perspective
  • Francesco Biagi
  • Published online:
    31 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • How were post-Arab Spring constitutions drafted? What are the most significant elements of continuity and change within the new constitutional texts? What purposes are these texts designed to serve? To what extent have constitutional provisions been enforced? Have the principles of constitutionalism been strengthened compared to the past? These are some of the key questions Francesco Biagi addresses. Constitution Building After the Arab Spring. A Comparative Perspective examines seven national experiences of constitution building in the Arab world following the 2011 uprisings, namely those of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. This interdisciplinary book, based largely on the author's own work and research in the region, compares these seven national experiences through four analytical frameworks: constitution-drafting and constitutional reform processes; separation of powers and forms of government; constitutional justice; and religion, women and non-Muslims within the framework of citizenship.

Contesting Pluralism(s)
  • Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond
  • Nora Fisher-Onar
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Contesting Pluralism(s) challenges a widespread tendency to limit studies of Turkish – and Muslim – politics to 'Islamist vs. secularist' or 'Islam vs. democracy' debates. Instead, Nora Fisher-Onar's innovative argument centers on coalitions for and against pluralism. Retelling Turkey's story from the late Ottoman Empire to the present as a tale of pluralizing vs. anti-pluralist coalitions, this book offers an alternative explanation for major outcomes from elections and coup d'etats to revolutions. Here, cross-camp alliances pit those who are willing to coexist with 'Other(s)' against those who champion a unitary, national project in which everyone speaks, believes, looks, and loves as they do. Drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary data, Fisher-Onar introduces an analytical framework for capturing causal complexity in political contestation. This study rejects Orientalist exceptionalism, rereading the relationship between political religion, pluralism, and populism via a framework that travels across and beyond the Muslim-majority world.

Polluted Politics
  • The Development of an Israeli-Palestinian E-Waste Economy
  • John-Michael Davis, Yaakov Garb
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • This book describes the politically charged afterlife of Israeli electronics gathered by and processed in a cluster of rural Palestinian villages that has emerged as an informal regional e-waste hub. As with many such hubs throughout the global South, rudimentary recycling practices represent a remarkable entrepreneurial means of livelihood amidst poverty and constraint, that generates staggering damage to local health and the environment, with tensions between these reaching a breaking point. John-Michael Davis and Yaakov Garb draw on a decade of community-based action research with and within these villages to contextualise the emergence, realities and future options of the Palestinian hub within both the geo-political realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank as well as shifting understandings of e-waste and recycling dynamics and policies globally. Their stories and analysis are a poignant window into this troubled region and a key sustainability challenge in polarized globalized world.

The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel
  • Netanel Flamer
  • Published online:
    21 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organisation Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas's intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew and English, Netanel Flamer analyzes the development of Hamas's various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas's activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

The King Can Do No Wrong
  • Blame Games and Power Sharing in Authoritarian Regimes
  • Scott Williamson
  • Published online:
    21 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Why are some autocrats more effective than others at retaining popular support even when their governments perform poorly? To develop insights into popular politics and governance across authoritarian regimes, this book stresses the importance of understanding autocratic blame games. Scott Williamson argues that how autocrats share power affects their ability to shift blame, so that they are less vulnerable to the public's grievances when they delegate decision-making powers to other political elites. He shows that this benefit of power-sharing influences when autocrats limit their control over decision-making, how much they repress, and whether their regimes provide accountability. He also argues that ruling monarchs are particularly well positioned among autocrats to protect their reputations by sharing power, which contributes to their surprising durability in the modern world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Jordan and cross-national analysis of autocracies, the book illustrates the important role of blame in the politics of authoritarian regimes.

Refining the Common Good
  • Oil, Islam and Politics in Gulf Monarchies
  • Miriam R. Lowi
  • Published online:
    08 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • How has Islam as a set of beliefs and practices shaped the allocation of oil revenues in Arab Gulf monarchies? In turn, how has oil wealth impacted the role of Islamic doctrine in politics? Refining the Common Good explores the relationship between Islamic norms and the circulation of oil wealth in Gulf monarchies. The study demonstrates how both oil (revenues) and Islam (as doctrine) are manipulated as tools of state power, and how religious norms are refined for the sake of achieving narrow secular interests. Miriam R. Lowi examines different institutionalized practices financed by hydrocarbon revenues and sanctioned, either implicitly or explicitly, by Islam, and uses evidence from Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia to show how these practices are infused with political purpose. The dynamic relationship between oil wealth and Islamic doctrine is exploited to contribute to the management and control of society, and the consolidation of dynastic autocracy.

Late Ottoman Gaza
  • An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation
  • Yuval Ben-Bassat, Johann Buessow
  • Published online:
    07 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • In contemporary public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theatre of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. However, little is known about Gaza's society, politics, economy, and culture during the Ottoman era. Drawing on a range of previously untapped local and imperial sources, Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow explore the city's history from the mid-nineteenth century through WWI. They show that Gaza's historical importance extends far beyond the territory of the 'strip' since the city was an important hub for people, goods, and ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity until the twentieth century. Using new digital methodologies, Ben-Bassat and Buessow introduce readers to the world of Gazans from various walks of life, from the traditional Muslim elites to the commoners and minority communities of Christians and Jews. In so doing, they tell the lively story of this significant but frequently misunderstood city.

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