Emanuela Dalmasso

Janine A. Clark and Francesco Cavatorta’s edited volume, Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges, is an entertaining and insightful collection of essays regarding the challenges of political science research. The volume draws together researchers who have worked in and on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).The title suggests that this work is written primarily for scholars of the MENA region; however, the volume provides important lessons regarding research challenges and major epistemological and methodological issues facing our discipline more broadly. It should be read by political scientists regardless of their focus, subfields, and methods. Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa is a rich and diverse collection of essays. It consists of 23 chapters written by 26 scholars drawn from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. In their work, these researchers have used a wide range of...

Highlights •An ‘extraterritorial gap’ in political geography and comparative politics impedes analysis of authoritarian power abroad. • Authoritarian rule from the home state continues to be exercised over populations abroad. •It treats nationals abroad as subjects or outlaws; patriots or traitors; clients or brokers, but never as citizens. •Authoritarianism should be studied as a mode of governing people through a set of practices, not as a territorial regime.

The literature on opposition movements in the Arab world has focused traditionally on the role that they perform in challenging the incumbent regimes. As Albrecht (2010: 3) argues 'opposition and contentious collective activism has almost exclusively been addressed by looking at the potential overthrow of incumbent regimes.'Recently however, more refined analyses of opposition politics in the Arab world have emerged. These studies examine the way in which opposition parties and movements become, willingly or unwillingly, pillars of ...

ABSTRACT The electoral results following the Arab Awakening have rewarded Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. Their arrival in power sparked once more intense scholarly and policy debates related to the relationship between Islamism, democracy and individual rights. This article examines that relationship in the context of the constitutional debates in Morocco and Tunisia, which have seen the prominent role of Islamist parties in attempting to shape the new constitutional charters. What emerges from this analysis is that, in the parties examined, pragmatism plays a greater role than fixed ideological positions.

Co-edited by Bassam Haddad, Rosie Bsheer, and Ziad Abu-Rish, this volume sheds light on the historical background and initial impact of the mass uprisings which shook the Arab world in late 2010 and early 2011. The authors provide unique understanding and first-hand accounts of events that have received superficial and partial coverage in Western and Arab media alike. While the book focuses on those states that have been most affected by the uprisings it also covers the impact on Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. The book covers the full range of issues involved in these historic events, from political economy and the role of social media, to international politics, gender, labour and the impact on culture, making this the ideal one-stop introduction to the events for the novice and specialist alike.

Within literature dealing with the civil society in the Arab world, the way in which the co-opted civil society groups operate and modify their structures and strategies in order to cope with the authoritarian context, both theoretically and empirically, is still under-researched. Furthermore, no comparable degree of attention – nay, no attention at all – has been given to the crucial problem of how those civil society movements which engaged in issues related to human rights and women’s rights, once they are co-opted by an “upgraded” authoritarian regime, change their strategies and structure to adapt themselves to the new political environment. My research aims at verifying the validity of the hypothesis that both the human rights movement and the women’s movement were able to obtain significant constitutional reforms thanks to the de-politicization of their demands, choosing to focus only on issues strictly related to their sphere of action and moving away from past political dem...

The democratic wave seems to have finally reached the shores of the Middle East. Nevertheless, some countries have been less affected than others. Morocco in particular is singled out as an ‘exception’ and, despite large protests beginning in February 2011, the country seems not to have experienced significant democratic change. This article questions the degree to which Morocco is indeed

In this chapter, Emanuela Dalmasso examines the self-discovery and challenges that Western women face when conducting interviews in the MENA region. She looks at three main processes. First, how to cope with only being recognized as a woman and not as a scholar. In practice how to reset, kindly but firmly, the boundaries of the interaction when research participants focus on gender identity instead of the professional one. Second, how to recognize respondents’ various misperceptions of researcher’s identity and how to react to them. Finally, how to understand respondents’ intersectionality by inquiring into practices, not just discourses.

This study sheds light on the relationship between local and national elites during political transitions. Examining local councils in post-revolutionary Tunisia (2011-2013), it examines why and when the composition of councils changed in the absence of local elections. The study yields two important lessons. First, changes in councils resulted from a power struggle between national and local elites. Councils were more likely to remain in place when local parties and unions helped council members resist pressures from above. The interplay of local and national actors, and not the council's competencies, explains when changes took place. Second, all councils became politicized in the process. Far from being caretaker councils impartially addressing local needs, the councils were institutions playing important roles in the struggles between local and national political elites. Councils were arenas in which political power, and notions of legitimate representation, were contested in the absence of elections. The argument is supported by quantitative analyses of original data and four comparative case studies based on qualitative fieldwork. The findings highlight the importance of local councils in transition processes and provide a basis for further work exploring local-national engagement in democratization.

How do authoritarian regimes use their international activities to boost legitimacy at home? The mechanisms that connect authoritarian international activities and domestic legitimation remain understudied. This essay sets out to fill this gap by presenting an attempt at creating a theory about the phenomenon-the dynamic legitimation model. This model connects two distinct actions: on the one hand, authoritarian elites observe the international context and produce discourses and policies that aim to create a positive country image, or brand. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders use the international recognition they consequently obtain to legitimize their rule at home, by presenting themselves as internationally praised role models. As in a hall of mirrors, the recognition achieved in the international context is discursively translated into evidence of good performance in front of the domestic population. The essay demonstrates this argument by illustrating how two contemporary authoritarian regimes, Morocco and Kazakhstan, actively try to conform to international discourses on religion, particularly regarding the promotion of moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue, while adapting their strategies to the situation at home. In addition, it shows how they capitalize on the praise they obtain in the attempt to boost legitimacy at home.

How do authoritarian regimes adapt to the challenges that population
movement poses? This article identifies a kind of control mechanism that, despite not being authoritarian in essence, may represent an asset for authoritarian regimes in search of new control tools in a global age. The analysis of an authoritarian regime’s use of new sophisticated techniques of ‘participation’ demonstrates how the creation of a participatory institution can work as a mechanism that offers participation while denying representation. By outlining the political dynamics that took place between the Moroccan authoritarian regime and its population abroad during the 2011 constitutional reform process, this article shows how the creation of a participatory institution, the Council for the Moroccan Community Abroad, provided the regime with a powerful and effective tool of control over Moroccans abroad. More specifically, it demonstrates how, paradoxically, the creation of an emigration-related consultative institution has hindered the possibility of Moroccans abroad to achieve meaningful political participation. The Moroccan case study demonstrates that an authoritarian regime in a
global age can successfully convert a loud horizontal voice from abroad into a not very loud vertical one through a ‘participation’ process.

The uprisings of the Arab Spring have highlighted the weakness of traditional opposition actors that have been unable to predict and lead the revolutions. This paper, focusing on the case of Morocco, examines how the discourses and practices of the regime shaped the complex field of Political Islam, contributing to two distinct but interlinked phenomena. On the one hand, they have managed to lead Islamists and liberal secularists to overcome many of their previous divisions to sustain common battles in the name of democracy and human ...

Abstract There is no doubt that one of the most contentious terrains of contestation in the supposed clash of values between Islamism and western values is the role of women in society. Thus, the issue of women's rights has become the litmus test for Arab societies with respect to the current zeitgeist of human rights in the age of democracy and liberalism. There is today a stereotypical view of debates surrounding women's rights in the Arab world where two distinct camps are in conflict with each other. On the one hand there are 'globalised' ...