Month: February 2022

How do common legacies and shared histories of repression shape the mobilization calculations of dissident elites in divided societies? What factors bind and fracture consensus formation and ethnic elite bargaining during democratic openings? Focusing on the anti-Ba’athist opposition that emerged following the First Gulf War, this presentation will explore the strategic interactions among ethnic dissident …

Ali Kadivar (Boston College) When the United States assassinated General Qasem Soleymani in Iran, the correspondents, TV anchors, and viewers all were stunned by the massive turnout in his funeral in Tehran. While at the first glance, this might have appeared as a spontaneous event, this event was one of the many state-led mobilization events …

Neil Ketchley (Oxford University) Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this paper, we explore how users can adapt to these restrictions. To do so, we analyze 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. …

Fatima Sadiqi (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University) The 2010-2011 uprisings in the Maghrib were instigated by new actors, and also by the new ambiguities that postcolonial rule in the region created. After more than a decade, substantial changes in feminist contestation strategies and practices are changing the post-uprisings era and transforming feminisms and gender politics …

Hind Zaki (University of Connecticut) Egypt is currently witnessing a moment of reckoning with sexual violence with women from different wakes of life coming forward to share their experiences with gender-based violence in the workplace, at home, and in the street. Facebook pages like Girls’ revolution, Instagram accounts like @Assault Police and @Rapists, and online …

Nermin Allam (Rutgers University) The literature on contentious politics has not traditionally engaged with the politics of the veil in protest movements. In this paper, I investigate how shifts in opportunities influence women’s choices around veiling within the context of contention politics. Using the case of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, I show the different mechanisms …

A widespread sense of ‘suspension’ and ‘impasse’ seem to overwhelm the activists in the Middle East today—a sense that whatever they do to alter the political status-quo does not yield. Why is that? In this talk, I take this quandary as a starting point to understand the current state of affair in the region marked …

Bruce Rutherford (Colgate University) The regime of Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi exhibits a deeper form of authoritarianism than its predecessor. Its distinctive features include a higher level of violence against the country’s civilian population. This paper develops a causal argument for why this change occurred by focusing on the dominant threat faced by Egypt’s ruler. The …

Cole Bunzel (Stanford University) How have jihadi actors and groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State, approached and interpreted the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010-11? In the early days of the revolutions, the jihadis sought to appropriate them in a way befitting their ideological worldview—one that considers the ruling Arab regimes as “apostate” and thus …