Author: csbarr

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 …

Andrew Simon (Dartmouth College) How might mass media assist us in rethinking the making of the modern Middle East? What is the future of popular culture as an avenue of academic inquiry? And in what ways can scholars counter the attempts of local authorities to monopolize the past in the present? In this talk, I …

Nahid Siamdoust (University of Texas/Austin) For nearly a century, Iran strived to achieve independence from foreign powers, both Russia to the east and European powers and the US to the west. With the revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Iran would be treading its own Islamic-Republican path of independence that adhered to “neither east …