Taking stock of MENA political science after the uprisings

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue demonstrates the scope and breadth of the response by political scientists to the 2011 Arab uprisings. The contributions show the significant, rigorous development of understanding key mechanisms and issues such as protest mobilization, repression, sectarianism and international alliances. They also demonstrate the enduring relevance of the Area Studies Controversy, the value of building and exploiting new data sources, and the importance of close attention to cases. At the same time, they reveal growing problems with access to Middle Eastern countries for political science research. The articles reveal intriguing similarities and differences between the European and American fields, and the potential for productive dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab uprisings
• Middle East and North Africa
• Area Studies Controversy
• comparative politics
• International Relations

This Special Issue (SI) takes the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Arab uprisings of 2011 to reflect upon the performance of the field of political science in the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There is little question that there has been an efflorescence of research and publication on the Middle East since 2011. The uprisings, failed and successful transitions, authoritarian restorations, and civil wars have offered ample ground for scholars to revisit old theories and to develop new ones. The crush of events and demand for new forms of expertise also made MENA political science more directly relevant to the rest of the discipline than ever before. A decade on is a good time for a reckoning, across subfields: has all of this academic activity produced new theoretical approaches or significantly improved our understanding MENA politics?

This SI brings together a set of novel and insightful reflections by Europe-based scholars which aim, in the words of the editors, ‘to take stock of political science research on the MENA a decade after the Arab uprisings.’ The SI showcases the genuinely impressive progress made by MENA political science scholars in the decade since the uprisings. The essays focus on three major research areas – social movement and protest research, comparative politics (CP), and International Relations (IR) – while remaining deeply sensitive to the connections and interactions across those levels. Through each research area, they ask a consistent set of questions: whether 2011 was a genuine theoretical rupture, what 2011 taught us about the Area Studies Controversy and the relationship of theoretical generalization and case specification (see Stephan Stetter in this SI), and how the closure of the field to research might shape the future of Middle East studies. The contributions offer both positive and less positive conclusions. They shine a welcome spotlight on the theoretical and empirical development of a wide range of literatures: IR alliance theory (May Darwich); sectarianism and identity politics (Morten Valbjørn); repression (Maria Josua and Mirjam Edel); and political mobilization and democratic outcomes (Irene Weipert-Fenner). And they note areas of lesser theoretical engagement where there remains significant opportunity for improvement. The SI makes an important, unique contribution to a wider, field-wide moment of reflection on the trends within the field.

In these concluding remarks, I highlight key questions and themes running across the SI, and sketch several areas for additional attention by the scholarly community. Significant shortcomings in the field’s response to the Arab uprisings include an overreaction to major events, an overidentification with particular actors, unexamined normative preference for particular outcomes, and the familiar tension highlighted across this SI, and particularly by Stephan Stetter and by André Bank and Jan Busse, between the Area Studies desire for deep local knowledge and the broader field’s desire for generalizable propositions. I finally discuss the implications of the increasing difficulty of getting access to the field for politically sensitive research due to increased repression, the targeting of foreign researchers by security services, and the general travel restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The perspective of a decade helps to realize that as a field and as an academy, we tend to overcorrect in response to revolutionary moments (Lynch, 2014a). As the Introduction to this SI observes, academic research trends tended to follow the timeline of events on the ground. Many scholars, caught up like the activists they studied in the early 2011 moment of enthusiasm, believed that there could be no going back to the politics of fear and corrupt authoritarianism. The exceptional nature of the protest wave encouraged, as Weipert-Fenner notes in this SI, great interest both from Middle East specialists and from general scholars of comparative contentious politics. The reversals of 2013 then arguably led to a second overcorrection, as the failure of democratic transitions and the resurgence of autocracy brought new wind to the sails of those convinced of the robust endurance of MENA authoritarianism. The 2019 protest wave in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon invited scholars to again get caught up in the revolutionary enthusiasm, only to see the COVID-19 pandemic shift power back towards repressive states. Each time, a wave of analysis seemed to soon be overtaken by events, suggesting to some that older theories of authoritarian resilience remained valid in the MENA.

This SI asks whether 2011 should be understood as a fundamentally transformative moment for both politics on the ground and scholarship, as a short-lived blip in an otherwise fairly stable area, or as a critical juncture within a long unfolding process of change (Hinnebusch, 2015; Yom, 2015). Has the region reached a new equilibrium after the disruptions of 2011 or is it on one end of swinging pendulum? Was 2011 simply a moment of enthusiasm, whose time passed as quickly as it arrived? Or was it a moment of fundamental transformation, in which even new rules which seem to resemble the old rules are really something different? How much contingency is there in the potential trajectories of regional politics? A decade seems an appropriate point for a stock taking exercise, with enough time passed to observe multiple stages of ‘outcomes’ and a significant accumulation of data, evidence and insights from many different methodological perspectives.

A longer time horizon can help with these fundamental questions. Structural conditions can change, creating or foreclosing political opportunities, unexpectedly and for reasons beyond the control of actors. How different actors respond to those structural changes in turn shapes the new realities which consolidate. Viewed from a wider lens, 2011 might be seen not as a unique moment, the beginning of something qualitatively new, but rather as one particularly high peak in an ongoing process of political contestation across the region. Thinking in terms of inflection points rather than ruptures does not mean minimizing the genuinely exceptional and revolutionary nature of the first few heady months of 2011, when time seemed compressed and the ordinary rules of politics suspended. But it does mean understanding the antecedents of that unique moment, and the precise ways in which all actors – regimes, militaries, protestors, Islamists, political parties, business, foreign powers – soon adapted to those new realities. Attention to the ongoing ebb and flow of protest activity across the region, as Weipert-Fenner’s contribution to the SI suggests, offers a fuller picture of the nature of political contention than does a singular focus on the early days of 2011, illustrating more clearly what was truly novel and what was more ordinary in those days. Similarly, the changing nature of repression, as discussed by Josua and Edel in this SI, can be better understood within longer trajectories of evolving authoritarianism, changing global and regional political economies, and the opportunities and challenges associated with new social media. Politics, the struggle for power and the pursuit of interests, continues even as conditions change.

Another way to think about this in a decade’s retrospective is in terms of the comparison group. As Weipert-Fenner’s SI contribution on popular protests helps us to ask, does 2011 look less or more unique with another decade of episodic protest activity across the region? One intriguing difference is that the demonstration and diffusion effects in recent years look less specifically ‘Arab’ than 2011 did. Where the massive wave of protest diffusion hit almost every Arab country in 2011 but skipped non-Arab countries in the region, subsequent years have seen major protest events hit Iran and Turkey. More global protest events, like Hong Kong, show remarkable similarities in ways which were less obvious in 2011. But even in 2011, we might have asked whether it made more sense to see Tunisia as part of a decade of African uprisings rather than as the beginning of an Arab spring (Branch & Mampilly, 2015). Sudan’s 2019 revolution put a spotlight on its liminal status as both African and Middle Eastern (Aidi et al., 2020). Similarly, Josua and Edel’s article in this SI notes that the MENA turn towards repression post-2011 mirrors global trends, a useful corrective to notions of MENA exceptionalism. Putting MENA into the Global South, and even more specifically into a broader regional context incorporating Africa and the non-Arab parts of the Middle East, could very usefully reframe both time horizons and comparison groups to provide more theoretically rigorous assessments of 2011 as a critical juncture (Ahram, 2018).

Changing region, changing literature

This SI is focused less on changes within the region itself than it is on the response of the political science literature to those changes (Schwedler, 2015; Valbjørn, 2015). The SI highlights a range of issues and research areas where significant theoretical advances can be seen over the last decade, less through the introduction of bold new grand theories than through the steady, rigorous explanation of causal mechanisms and institutions in diverse and changing environments. It exemplifies the progress in several of these research domains, including sectarianism, repression and mobilization. It particularly helpfully spotlights the increasing intersection between scholars of comparative politics and International Relations (see Darwich in this SI, and the introduction by Bank and Busse).

What does it mean to say, as per a common criticism, that MENA studies are theoretically impoverished? Compared to what? Prior to 2011, MENA political science made significant theoretical contributions to key debates in both comparative politics and IR, and over the last decade has made considerable theoretical progress in the specification, conceptualization and analysis of a wide range of core mechanisms, as the contribution to this SI on the study of sectarianism makes clear. Theoretical progress might be more usefully seen not in the declaration of grand new theories but rather in this incremental progress. For instance, moving beyond a dichotomous success/failure of democratization view as the central outcome variable, the SI contribution on popular protests examines demonstrations in cross-country and cross-regional perspectives while paying close attention to the micro level. Similarly, the nuanced analysis made by an essay in the SI of the different forms of repression employed across Arab countries in response to the perceived threat of the uprisings both improves our understanding of MENA politics and has relevance to parallel debates in other regions. Such analytical moves allow for a much clearer and better grounded theoretical approach to protests which is informed by the wealth of new data points and which aligns with literature produced outside of the MENA field.

The literature on authoritarian resilience is another especially critical window into the question of the field’s performance and adaptation, as Weipert-Fenner, Bank and Busse, and Josua and Edel’s contributions to the SI highlight. The robust literature on the durability and adaptability of Arab authoritarianism dominated the field in the late 2000s. This consensus clearly took a blow in 2011, as the SI contribution on authoritarianism and repression also suggests. Works predicting the stability of authoritarian regimes were rapidly rewritten or reinterpreted to accommodate the sudden new realities. But as democratic transitions failed and autocrats clawed back power, circa 2013, advocates of authoritarian resilience re-emerged to claim vindication (Bellin, 2012; Brownlee et al., 2015). That response, while understandable, made little sense in analytical terms. The ability of authoritarian regimes to regain power after losing it to popular upheaval is quite different from their ability to prevent such disruptive change at all. The new forms of authoritarianism in countries such as Egypt, the renegotiation of constitutional terms in monarchies such as Morocco and Jordan, or the survival through extreme violence in countries such as Bahrain and Syria, produced very different regimes than those which existed in the late 2000s. Sisi’s Egypt is not Mubarak’s Egypt, just as Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia is not King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia. Minimizing the truly disruptive power of the 2011 protests does no more to advance political science understanding of regional politics than did exaggerating their transformative potential. Once again, a longer view and a comparative perspective inform genuine theoretical progress.

To see this theoretical development unfold, consider the concept of the ‘wall of fear’ (Asad, 2012). In the early days of 2011, political scientists and local actors alike observed that the uprisings had shattered the wall of fear which had permeated Arab politics for decades. Breaking through this wall through mass collective action undermined the foundations of autocratic stability and empowered public political action by emboldened citizens. But over the course of the post-2011 decade, an ancillary assumption, that there could be no going back, proved to be wrong. Indeed, the determination of regimes to reimpose that wall of fear could be seen in the extreme forms of repression and state violence in which they engaged (as in Bahrain, Syria, Libya or Egypt) or which they allowed their media to enthusiastically cover in all its gory detail (as in the coverage of Syria, Libya or the extreme brutality of the Islamic State). This single, simple concept nicely illustrates the challenge facing MENA political scientists in terms of theoretical and conceptual development. In 2011, scholars accurately captured the importance of the collapse of the wall of fear. That fear returned through social polarization, fierce regime repression and the observation of brutal civil war abroad did not invalidate the earlier observation. These trends led MENA scholars to introduce serious theoretical consideration of the importance of emotions for political behaviour and for assessing the full range of outcomes of both successful and failed uprisings (Pearlman, 2013, 2016). An analysis frozen in 2011 which did not trace the mechanisms by which fear dissipated and then returned would be an impoverished one – as would one which refused to acknowledge that those changes had ever taken place.

Or consider the seemingly robust conclusion in 2011 that recent memory of civil war inhibits uprising (Lynch, 2014a), which emerged as a consensus explanation for the absence of major uprisings in countries such as Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan. Eight years later, all four countries simultaneously experienced their own wave of major protest mobilization, rather decisively disconfirming a once widely accepted explanation. Again, this should not be reason to dismiss the earlier literature. There were good reasons for believing the hypothesis, with plausible causal mechanisms (memory of war promotes non-violent resistance, or increases caution about pushing too hard, or inhibits regime violence), a range of observable outcomes, and considerable qualitative evidence from citizens of those countries. The absence of protests in those countries in 2011 and their simultaneous protests in 2019 becomes an opportunity to refine arguments, further test the operation of causal mechanisms, and to listen to citizens in those countries to find out what changed. Creative work could now seek to show how and why such memories may have had an inhibiting effect in 2011 but have lost such power by 2019. That, in turn, could have very significant implications for how we might anticipate political evolution in post-conflict Syria or Libya – or post-violent repression Bahrain and Egypt – in the coming years.

The evolution of thinking about the nature and impact of repression, as discussed by Josua and Edel in this SI, is a good example of this theoretical progress. As scholars have come to grips with the variable processes of the post-Arab Uprisings contention, they have developed far more nuanced concepts and tools for understanding the nature of repression and its effects. Repression is not an undifferentiated mechanism of domination and control. It runs through different types of security institutions, operates across different levels of analysis, and has different goals. Repression might aim at constraining or incapacitating or eliminating political opponents. It might be targeted or indiscriminate. This progress in conceptualizing repression then opens the door to rethinking key hypotheses in political science. Does repression produce moderation or extremism (Nugent, 2020)? When, and under what conditions, does repression generate a backlash? Does steady state repression have different effects than sudden shifts towards more or less intensity? What motivates protestors facing repression to remain non-violent or to take up arms? This emergent research programme can deploy mixed methods and new data sources to consider short- and long-term effects, different patterns in state repression, the psychological foundations of responses to repression, internationalization of repression, targeted vs. indiscriminate repression, violent and non-violent responses, the legitimation of repression, the complex relationship between regime threat perception and repression.

Another clear area of theoretical progress highlighted in this SI (especially see Weipert-Fenner) has been moving beyond dichotomous success/failure of democratization as outcome variable. What appears to be a success at one point might have tipped over into failure by the next observation, as in Libya’s successful navigation of several elections before crashing into civil war or Egypt’s remarkable series of elections collapsing into the military coup in 2013. What is more, regimes which might be coded as witnessing no change because they remained autocratic may actually have changed in profound ways. Syria’s Assad and Bahrain’s Al-Khalifa dynasty survived, but the countries they rule are utterly transformed. Democracy may matter less than other institutional variables for explaining political outcomes, anyway. Democratic Tunisia has experienced regular protest activity which resembles that seen in monarchical Morocco and autocratic Algeria. Political science has evolved significantly in its ability to characterize and understand the nuances in outcomes across multiple levels of analysis.

International dimensions

IR may have once been a backward subfield, compared to the energy and ferment in the CP subfield. But more recently, despite the pessimism expressed in the SI, IR has more than caught up with CP and in some ways has possibly surpassed it. Comparativists have tended to treat each Arab case in isolation, with outcomes and dynamics primarily a function of the domestic balance of power and local conditions (Brownlee et al., 2015; King, 2020). Today, there is increasingly widespread recognition, in this SI and elsewhere, of the deeply internationalized nature of MENA political competition (Lynch & Ryan, 2017). Arab authoritarianism is underwritten by external allies, whether Russian support to the Assad regime in Syria or American support to its regional clients. In the years following 2011, regional regimes become critical external factors in many states across the region themselves, from Iran stepping up to protect Assad or the UAE-Saudi support to Egypt’s 2013 military coup. Civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen have been fully regionalized as well, with direct and indirect involvement by multiple regional powers shaping outcomes. The SI effectively highlights these transnational drivers of outcomes, with IR scholars helping CP scholars to understand the diverse external factors shaping domestic arenas.

IR theory, as Darwich shows in this SI, has branched out remarkably as it has grappled with these new realities. The diffusion of protest in 2011 clearly showed the permeability of state borders. Egypt’s uprising may have grown out of years of mounting protest mobilization and local grievances, but it simply would not have happened without the Tunisian trigger. Simultaneous massive protests using identical slogans and tactics would not have appeared in a dozen other countries without the Egyptian example. Syrian protestors would have made different choices without the NATO intervention in Libya. Similarly, the 2013 autocratic resurgence did not simply happen on a case by case basis. The restoration of military rule in Egypt and the turn towards upgraded authoritarianism reflected an intentional transnational strategy of autocratic cooperation spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE (Darwich, 2017). Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and other regimes have increasingly engaged in transnational repression, targeting dissidents abroad in new ways, as Josua and Edel observe in this SI. European fears of refugees cascading out of the region’s war zones further built renewed support for cooperation with authoritarian regimes viewed as at least capable of stemming those population flows. These realities point to the need for fully integrating international dimensions into CP in the MENA region.

Beyond the implications for domestic outcomes, the IR literature has developed in a number of critical new theoretical and empirical directions, embracing the fluidity in the real world which CP scholars had enjoyed only so fleetingly. As Darwich demonstrates in this SI, this can be seen clearly in the alliance literature, where scholars trace the shifting patterns of abandonment vs entrapment, underbalancing, and international-regional connections. There is much more to the emergent IR field than that, however. The wars in Syria and Libya have generated an important new research programme on proxy warfare and the changing nature of power in regional politics (Lynch, 2021, inpress). The rise of the Islamic State, as Darwich’ essay in this SI discusses, sparked new research on the durability of borders and on the provision of rebel governance (Ahram, 2019; Heydemann, 2018; Revkin & Ahram, 2020). The rise of the Gulf states as major players in regional politics has sparked a theoretical novel literature on the political economy of Gulf power (Hanieh, 2018; Ulrichsen, 2020). The negotiation of the nuclear agreement with Iran and the subsequent American withdrawal from the deal opened up space for novel applications of bargaining theory and multi-level games. The relative decline in U.S. primacy and the idiosyncrasy of the Trump administration’s policies has sparked important rethinking of the nature of American hegemony and the endurance of regional order (Gause, 2019). The crisis between Qatar and the Saudi-Emirati axis which ripped apart the Gulf Cooperation Council defied the expectations of most theoretical perspectives. In short, where the CP subfield has in many real ways become captive to the stagnation of the countries it studies and the limitations of access to the field (see below), the IR subfield has blossomed as new problems and unexpected developments emerge.

The Area Studies Controversy, and other trends

As an American political scientist, I found it striking how different the discussion in this largely European project has been from comparable debates in US political science. The Area Studies Controversy highlighted in this SI by Stetter and by Bank and Busse most directly, is a useful example of this divergence. In European political science, this debate perhaps structures key parts of the intellectual discourse surrounding the production of knowledge. In American political science, it mostly does not, and has not since the 1990s (Tessler et al., 1999). While there are many deeply significant debates taking place about the status of knowledge, the ethics of inquiry and the importance of causal inference, virtually none of them revolve around the traditional juxtaposition of the local knowledge of area studies with the generalizing impulse of the social science disciplines. As Stetter suggests here, the ASC can usefully be reframed around a global political sociology which places MENA within global horizons and historically entrenched hierarchies. The essay intriguingly notes that International Relations has been the most receptive subfield to such thinking in recent years, an observation borne out by several other contributions to this SI.

I would like to highlight one theme within this debate which cuts across these different academic fields: the question of normative commitments and the appropriate standpoint for analysis. Several of the contributors to the SI push for greater attention to the voices of the marginalized and a move away from the standpoint of power. This tracks closely with not only traditional appeals from left-leaning scholars for such identification with the people from the region, but also with emergent calls to foreground the ethics of academic research in the region highlighted by Bank and Busse and by Stetter in this SI (Clark & Cavatorta, 2018; Lynch, 2014b). But does such a laudable normative standpoint necessarily produce better, sounder or more accurate analysis? Were Arab activists and scholars less caught up in the 2011 moment of enthusiasm than their Western interlocutors? Did they have better insight into how to prevent Egypt’s democratic failure or Syria’s slide into internationalized civil war? The best work in the decade since the uprisings effectively combines close attention to voices from the region with rigorous theoretical and comparative work, rather than overly privileging one over the other. The Beirut School of Critical Security Studies discussed in the introduction to this SI offers one important model, as does the Yemen Policy Centre based in Berlin and the U.S. based Project on Middle East Political Science.

Several trends within American political science suggest that such a renewed discussion of the key themes of the Area Studies Controversy may be valuable. The last several generations of American Middle East specialists have combined methodological sophistication with significant field research and language skills, which in turn reduced the salience of the Area Studies Controversy. The escalating fetishization of method and prioritizing of causal inference over other considerations in American political science, along with changes in the publication expectations and the job market, has led to an imbalance in graduate education. More time spent in methodological training can too often lead to lost opportunities for language training and acquisition of area knowledge, while tighter expectations on time to degree make it difficult for students to spend lengthy periods of time in country gaining local knowledge. The introduction of new standards for Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) by many major political science journals further prioritizes such methodological issues at the expense of the demands of research in Middle Eastern contexts, which could further skew publication trends (Hochschild et al., 2015). All of this, as noted in the introduction to the SI, will likely be exacerbated given the growing difficulty of getting access to many countries or political research, whether due to the growing pattern of arrests or worse of foreign scholars or fear of violence or the effects of COVID-19. As opportunities to generate deeply informed empirics through field research shrink, methods-driven manipulations of existing data may look more attractive as a publication strategy. To the extent this shapes the field, then the need for a new Area Studies debate – as one Stetter suggests in the SI – may grow in tandem as scholars are forced to rethink epistemological commitments and standards for empirical knowledge.

Almost all of the contributors to the SI highlight a wide range of outstanding new methods and data collection, such as painstakingly produced protest event histories, social media and online videos. Somewhat missing, by contrast, is the boom in survey research and experimental methods which has increasingly dominated MENA publications in the major journals in American political science. Survey research such as the Arab Barometer has boomed, both in quantity and quality, and has served as the data foundations for a significant number of high-quality publications. As Weipert-Fenner documents in this SI, building new datasets through novel sources has been a key contribution of the last decade of research. Experimental manipulations embedded within surveys have been a particularly common method for these articles. Another growing area of research has been sophisticated analysis of vast quantities of social media data (Siegel, 2019). All of these may contribute to filling in the gap created by lost access to countries in the region, if carried out with an appropriate attention to the nature and quality of the data being collected.

Changing access to the field

The strong performance by MENA scholars in explaining the Arab uprisings was facilitated by the presence of a strong cohort of scholars of multiple generations with long, deep experience in the field upon which to draw. While some of the most influential early interpretations of the region were penned by non-specialists drawn by the allure of the revolutionary moment, the more enduring contributions mostly came from those with real area studies expertise. Analysis of the Egyptian revolution could draw upon the accumulated expertise of scholars who had researched the country for years, developed robust networks of contacts, possessed strong language skills, and could put events into perspective.

The uprisings in the short term radically increased access to certain countries for political research. With dictators toppled and countries in fervent, it suddenly became possible to meet openly with actors such as Islamists or revolutionary activists. People who had long feared surveillance by police states were suddenly eager to talk with researchers. There were tantalizing hints that state documents which had long been inaccessible might become open for research, whether released by more democratic regimes or captured from looted intelligence agency offices. The rush of protests, new forms of civil society and elections offered new research topics and focal points for research communities. Social media offered access to a wide range of individuals beyond the familiar usual suspects. Public opinion survey research seemed more consequential, and useful to political actors in those countries. Politics in these transitional countries was interesting, and political scientists were able to take full advantage.

The aftermath of the uprisings proved hostile to such research, however. Countries which fell into civil war, such as Syria, Libya and Yemen, became largely off-limits to researchers due to safety concerns. The promise of opening state archives did not materialize. As the introduction to this SI notes, the authoritarian backlash across the region progressively closed off opportunities for research through visa denials, arrests and harassment. The groups and individuals that researchers hoped to research became less accessible, whether because they had themselves been arrested or killed or because they had grown weary of politics. The murder of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni by Egyptian security services shocked the scholarly community, as did the arrest of numerous dual-national scholars. And then the COVID-19 pandemic closed down most international travel.

This closure could push researchers into topics and countries deemed safe, resulting in an avalanche of studies on a handful of countries. Work based on statistical analysis of existing data sets will be less affected than qualitative research which depends on sustained access to the field. Trends such as survey experiments and social media research will likely grow even more popular by virtue of their availability. And studies of the few countries where field research remains relatively open, such as Tunisia and Jordan, may come to dominate the literature unhealthily. More robust connections and partnerships between Western scholars and scholars from the region could help to mitigate some of these issues. This could be exploitative if handled poorly, with Western researchers using their Arab colleagues as virtual research assistants, letting them take the risks while reaping the professional rewards. But if done well, it could lead to the prioritization of building much-needed infrastructure for scholarship in the region.

This SI demonstrates powerfully how the field of MENA political science has grappled with a decade’s worth of upheavals and reversals. The contributors demonstrate through their deep and thoughtful engagement across multiple issue areas that the field has made significant advances, even as it faces escalating challenges at multiple levels.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) that has been funded under the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [Grant 01DL20003].