What challenges do researchers encounter in authentically engaging with the field site and academia when certain aspects of their true identities diverge from the established norms within those domains? Using the case of female political scientists who conduct research on gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, I highlight the ethical, logistical, and epistemological challenges of carrying out research in a politically and socially closed context. Few studies have investigated how the research process and the knowledge it produces are affected by the intertwinement of authoritarianism and patriarchy, and by the researcher’s positionality within this context. This study fills this gap by drawing upon interviews with feminist political scientists who were born and raised in the region but are based in Western academic institutions to examine the impact of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the researchers’ insider/outsider positionality on the research process. The analysis shows three key findings. First, researching gender politics is a contentious topic that places researchers on the radar of the state. For scholars who are originally from the region, the issue is compounded by the fact that they are sometimes viewed as traitors by the regime in their country of origin, which accuses them of tarnishing the image of the government and scrutinizing its gender policies. Second, within the wider society, the politics of representation also impose certain limitations and expectations on female scholars. Such limitations include gendered restrictions on their access and mobility in the field. Finally, feminist researchers share how the knowledge they produce, which centers social justice demands, is not always valued in the discipline of political science. The article contributes to this discipline by expanding our understanding of the interplay between identity politics, fieldwork practices, and knowledge production in complex political and social settings.

This paper proposes a framework of immigrant acceptance that accounts for both group-level and individual-level characteristics and conducts a novel test of the cultural threat hypothesis. Immigrants’ individual traits are conceptualized as secondary to their identity-based claims. The empirical strategy leverages a set of survey experiments conducted in the extreme rentier state of Qatar, where naturalization poses tangible negative financial consequences for citizens by expanding the pool of government welfare beneficiaries. Findings demonstrate that citizens are willing to share citizenship with a narrow ethnic in-group while individual cultural and economic attributes are lower-order determinants influencing economically vulnerable citizens. Importantly, answers to direct survey measures are at odds with these findings, demonstrating their susceptibility to social desirability bias.

How do technocrat ministers affect governance under autocracy? Autocrats frequently appoint non-partisan actors with technical competencies to bureaucratic leadership roles. Though their competencies might predict positive performance in office, these ministers are also dependent on the regime for their position and should thus demonstrate loyalty to its interests. I test this in the context of horizontal accountability to the legislature, using data on more than 27,000 legislative requests submitted to ministries in Morocco. I use both exact matching and difference-in-differences analyses to show that technocrat ministers are more than 25 percentage points less likely to respond to legislative queries than partisan cabinet members. The results imply that outside (partisan) participation in government strengthens weak institutions of executive oversight. They also cast doubt on the presumption that technocrat participation in government is universally beneficial to governance.

This article uses a “mystery client” approach and visits the websites of National Statistical Offices and international microdata libraries to assess whether foundational microdata sets for countries in the Middle East and North Africa region are collected, up to date, and made available to researchers. The focus is on population and economic censuses, price data and consumption, labor, health, and establishment surveys. The results show that about half of the expected core data sets are being collected and that only a fraction is made available publicly. As a consequence, many summary statistics, including national accounts and welfare estimates, are outdated and of limited relevance to decision-makers. Additional investments in microdata collection and publication of the data once collected are strongly advised.

Following the events of 11 September 2001, measures aimed at countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) were intensified by States. Many countries around the world adopted strict anti-money laundering and CFT regulations for the transfer of funds globally. This process increased the costs of complying with regulatory requirements and imposed high penalties on banks for non-compliance. As a result, preventive measures – often known as “de-risking” – were taken up by banks, including terminating the accounts of clients perceived as “high-risk” for money laundering or terrorist financing, and delaying transfers. These measures, however, have had negative consequences, reducing financial access for local civil society organizations in conflict-affected contexts that are deemed high-risk for terrorist activities. Drawing on five years of research to understand the impact of de-risking on conflict-affected contexts from a local perspective, this paper reflects on the local political economy of CFT, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. It explores two key areas of inquiry. The first of these is the politics of interpretation – how counterterrorism as a discourse and a set of practices, of which CFT is one, gets interpreted by local authorities and banks, and subsequently gets reinterpreted to the population. This also has implications for which local actors are better positioned to access funds than others, and why. The second area of inquiry is the politics of vulnerability – how the local political economy impact of CFT can increase the social and economic vulnerabilities of some groups more than others. This paper demonstrates that under the guise of “counterterrorism”, local authorities in conflict-affected contexts have used CFT to restrict the non-profit and philanthropic space and are using banking regulations to shape that space in ways that are bound to have negative medium- and long-term implications for it.

This article examines the ways in which global heritage discourse has operated across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, from an ideological and historical perspective. Ideologically, I consider tensions between heritage preservation practice and religious traditions that share the same landscape or material culture. This discussion, which is relatively marginalized in the heritage literature, has an adverse effect on many attempts by heritage preservationists to mediate or resolve conflicts and contradictions surrounding this type of historic resource. Historically, I revisit the presence and inclusion of experts from the MENA region in the formative years of a global heritage ideology. In this discussion, I juxtapose the relative marginalization of the Middle East and North Africa in global heritage debates against the frequency with which sites and communities across this region are put in the spotlight of religion-driven heritage conflict. Addressing these two forms of (mis)representation, I aim to bring to the foreground the way in which heritage studies is implicated in the constructions of narratives about – not from or by – the MENA region.

While MERIP's offered incisive critiques of the power relations that defined the existing field of Middle East studies, this essay explores how it also represents an alternative model of knowledge production, built outside academia, that has helped reshape scholarship and teaching about the Middle East and North Africa and more broadly about the US relationship to the region. The essay also introduces the other contributions in this forum including an edited transcript of 2020 MESA roundtable on the impact of MERIP on Middle East studies, a historical account that traces the origins of the MERIP collective and three essays exploring the evolution of MERIP's approach addressing, in turn, contributions and innovations within the areas of critical political economy, gender studies, and the politics of culture. Finally, drawing on these contributions as well as Middle East Report issue no. 300 that reviews how MERIP covered various topics, the essay concludes by highlighting the continuing value of MERIP as a teaching resource that allows students and others to understand the transformations across the region over the past half century as well as shifting approaches and theories that have come to help define Middle East studies as an academic field.

Within the Special Issue ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security, and conflicts’, this article investigates the post-2011 changing relationship between International Relations (IR) and Middle Eastern Studies (MES). The article departs from the assumption that the reading and writing of security in, on and from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically been trapped between the projection of security from abroad and endogenous security narratives. We argue that within the post-Arab uprisings renewed scholarly attention, with studies on security in, on and from the MENA region expressing an all-time methodological pluralism and the increasing and original application of bottom-up and non-military security understandings to regional security, societal and human security are among the most promising notions for transformative dialogue between IR and MES. In broader theoretical terms, we show how the ongoing debate on post-Weberian notions of statehood and post-Westphalian sovereignty point to an already transformative dialogue between IR and MES. The article illustrates this trend with two case studies – on Tunisia and on Iraq – pointing to changing security concepts reflecting changing security practices.

The nexus between China's human and economic presence abroad and its security policy is increasingly important. Within this nexus, this study statistically explores whether and to what extent Chinese contractors reduce the number of Chinese nationals they send to work in North Africa, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa when the security situation in host states worsens. We find no significant evidence that either warnings from Chinese embassies and consulates to leave host countries or expert perceptions of host stability influence the number of Chinese workers. Worker numbers appear to decrease significantly only in the aftermath of large-scale violent events. These findings suggest that Chinese companies are relatively acceptant of security risks and uncertainties, despite the decade-long regulatory efforts of the Chinese government to make them more security-conscious overseas and, thus, to reduce pressure to use diplomatically and economically expensive military means for their protection.

The issue “Pluralisms in Emergenc(i)es” is a result of a two-conference series that took place in Amman and Tunis, in December 2017 and October 2018, respectively. Taking these two locations as historical epicenters of human, commodity, and capital mobility, in two connected regions, these conferences set out to interrogate the historical, social, and religious underpinnings of the migrant and refugee crisis in order to position this moment as a state of emergence, rather than a state of emergency. The focus of the essays included here explores pluralism as it has emerged in response to contemporary global crises, and asks a number of questions: What are the variations in how “pluralism” is understood, and how does it function in a time of crisis? What are the material and immaterial modes through which pluralism takes shape? Moreover, how does it change through the circulation of people - as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers – and capital – whether under the auspices of international development funds, religious aid, or new labor markets? By crossing disciplinary boundaries, this special issue enters into a fundamental discussion about how “pluralism” is conceived across sites and offers new vistas for its conceptualization in North Africa and the Middle East.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread globally, forcing countries to apply lockdowns and strict social distancing measures. The aim of this study was to assess eating habits and lifestyle behaviours among residents of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the lockdown. A cross-sectional study among adult residents of the MENA region was conducted using an online questionnaire designed on Google Forms during April 2020. A total of 2970 participants from eighteen countries participated in the present study. During the pandemic, over 30 % reported weight gain, 6·2 % consumed five or more meals per d compared with 2·2 % before the pandemic (P < 0·001) and 48·8 % did not consume fruits on a daily basis. Moreover, 39·1 % did not engage in physical activity, and over 35 % spent more than 5 h/d on screens. A significant association between the frequency of training during the pandemic and the reported change in weight was found (P < 0·001). A significantly higher percentage of participants reported physical and emotional exhaustion, irritability and tension either all the time or a large part of the time during the pandemic (P < 0·001). Although a high percentage of participants reported sleeping more hours per night during the pandemic, 63 % had sleep disturbances. The study highlights that the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused a variety of lifestyle changes, physical inactivity and psychological problems among adults in the MENA region.