POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

Glenn Robinson of the Naval Postgraduate School talks about his latest book, Global Jihad: A Brief History, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book tells the story of four distinct jihadi waves, each with its own program for achieving a global end: whether a Jihadi International to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation; al-Qa'ida's call to drive the United States out of the Muslim world; ISIS using "jihadi cool" to recruit followers; or leaderless efforts of stochastic terror to "keep the dream alive." (Starts at 24:22). Dina Bishara of Cornell University discusses her new article, "Precarious Collective Action: Unemployed Graduates Associations in the Middle East and North Africa." (Starts at 0:50). Sarah Parkinson of Johns Hopkins University talks about "Practical Ideology in Militant Organizations." (Starts at 10:17). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page.

Ahmed Khanani of Earlham College talks about his latest book, All Politics are God’s Politics: Moroccan Islamism and the Sacralization of Democracy, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book enables readers to understand and appreciate the significance of dimuqrāṭiyya [democracy] as a concept alongside new prospects for Islam and democracy in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (Starts at 22:49). Kaoutar Ghilani of Oxford University speaks about her new article, "The legitimate’ after the uprisings: justice, equity, and language politics in Morocco," published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. (Starts at 0:56). Chantal Berman of Georgetown University discusses her new article, "Policing the Organizational Threat in Morocco: Protest and Public Violence in Liberal Autocracies," published in the American Journal of Political Science. (Starts at 11:41). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page.

Aaron Rock-Singer of University of Wisconsin-Madison talks about his latest book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book shows how Islamic activists and institutions across the political spectrum reshaped daily practices [in Egypt] in an effort to persuade followers to adopt novel models of religiosity. (Starts at 27:42). Bassel Salloukh of Lebanese-American University speaks about his new special issue article, "Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World: A Critical Stocktaking," published in the Journal of Studies of in Ethnicity and Nationalism. (Starts at 1:13). Carolyn Barnett, graduate student at Princeton University, and Steve Monroe of Yale-NUS College discuss their new piece (co-authored with Amaney Jamal of Princeton University), "Earned Income and Women’s Segmented Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Jordan," published in the American Journal of Political Science. You can also read their piece on Remote work and women’s employment in MENA: opportunity or pitfall?" posted in the Economic Research Forum. (Starts at 11:36). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page. You can listen to this week’s podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud:

Alex Thurston of the University of Cincinnati talks about his latest book, Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book studies cases of jihadist movements in North Africa and the Sahel, examining them from the inside, uncovering their activities and internal struggles over the past three decades. (Starts at 19:50). Michael Robbins, Director of the Arab Barometer, introduces the Arab Barometer and discusses recent polling work on themes including the normalization of Arab states with Israel, and the effects of COVID-19. (Starts at 1:14). Christiana Parreira of Stanford University discusses her recent article, "Power politics: Armed non-state actors and the capture of public electricity in post-invasion Baghdad," published in the Journal of Peace Research. (Starts at 10:10).

Kelsey Norman of Rice University talks about her latest book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. The book proposes the concept of 'strategic indifference', where states [such as Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey] proclaim to be indifferent toward migrants and refugees, thereby inviting international organizations and local NGOs to step in and provide services on the state's behalf. (Starts at 28:27). Gail Buttorff of University of Houston speaks about her new report, "COVID-19 Pandemic Compounds Challenges Facing MENA Research," (co-authored with Nermin Allam of Rutgers University and Marwa Shalaby of University of Wisconsin-Madison) published in the American Political Science Association Fall 2020 MENA Politics Newsletter. You can also read their pieces: "A Survey Reveals How the Pandemic Has Hurt MENA Research" and "Gender, COVID and Faculty Service." (Starts at 1:40). Samer Abboud of Villanova University discusses his piece, "Syria, Crisis Ecologies, and Enduring Insecurities in the MENA," published in POMEPS Studies 42: MENA's Frozen Conflicts. You can also read his latest pieces: "Reconciling fighters, settling civilians: the making of post-conflict citizenship in Syria" and "Imagining Localism in Post-Conflict Syria: Prefigurative Reconstruction Plans and the Clash Between Liberal Epistemology and Illiberal Conflict." (Starts at 14:05). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi.

Aaron Jakes talks about his latest book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. Jakes explains, “In the broadest sense, the book, it is a history of the period of British rule in Egypt after the occupation of 1882. And it makes three broad arguments: first, that this particular form of colonial rule was organized around the discourse that I call colonial economist…the second major argument of the book is that under these conditions, Egypt became a crucial laboratory and target for financial investment in the worldwide financial expansion that was characteristic of global capitalism at the end of the 19th century. And finally, I'm sort of interested in the interplay between the discursive claims of the British regime and these dramatic transformations that were taking place…” He goes on to say, “You have people who, by the early 1900s, are articulating critiques of imperial finance that look logically quite similar to arguments that were more familiar with from people like Lenin...You have people who start to articulate things that look like early instances of dependency theory and those people are all at the same time trying to think through what the implications of these dramatic economic transformations were for the possibilities of different kinds of politics in the country.” “It was certainly the case that by the early 1900s, the British could, in their annual reports and other modes of publicity around what they were doing in Egypt, claim that they had delivered unprecedented prosperity to the country, and those claims, which had a power to circulate globally, that was much greater than that of most of the people that were contesting them, have a really significant resonance in other places…it's quite interesting that the government of the United States at the moment, which is beginning to think through what American forms of colonial rule in places like the Philippines might look like, looks to Egypt as a possible model for what they might do there,” said Jakes. Aaron Jakes is an Assistant Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, where he teaches courses on the modern Middle East and South Asia, global environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page.

Joas Wagemakers talks about his new book, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history and complex relationship with Jordan, its parliament and society. “In Jordan [the Muslim Brotherhood] basically had Royal support from the very start, and the reason for that was that the King did not really have a lot of authority within the country of Transjordan, as it was still called in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, and sought sources of authority that would help him gain the status of King or ruler in this new nation” explains Wagemakers. Wagemakers says, “After 1989, when decisions had to be made about: are we going to participate in elections, are we going to participate in the government if the government asked us to, are we going to be responsible for the decisions that we make. [The Muslim Brotherhood] really had to make political decisions. The existing divisions within the Muslim Brotherhood became clearer and clearer.” “The brotherhood did radicalize under pressure, let's say in the 1990s, but only by resorting to the means of boycotting the election. It was in the 2010s, so the past few years, when there was quite a bit of repression that the Brotherhood had moderated further simply because they saw in Saudi Arabia, in The United Arab Emirates, in Egypt and in other countries as well, that the Brotherhood was increasingly coming under the fire, was being labeled a terrorist organization… the Islamic Action Front really had only one way left to remain relevant and to remain legal, which was to engage in parliamentary elections,” notes Wagemakers. Joas Wagemakers is an Associate Professor of Islam and Arabic at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He obtained his PhD in Nijmegen, received the Erasmus Research Prize in 2011 for his dissertation, was a researcher at Clingendael and a visiting research fellow at Princeton University. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/) page.

Sherine Hafez talks about her latest book, Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In her book, she demonstrates how women were a central part of the revolutionary process of the Arab Spring; not only protesting in the streets of Cairo, but also demanding democracy, social justice, and renegotiation of a variety of sociocultural structures that repressed and disciplined them. Hafez explains, “I just wanted to make sure that the contributions of women in the Midan during the uprisings, and specifically in Egypt, were documented so that…the activism cannot be written off as just part of the revolution…And I wanted so much to make sure that this is a record that can be read by future young activists of all genders, so that they can look back and know that there is a record of their contributions to politics in the Middle East.” Hafez goes on, “When I decided to write the book, the revolution was in its hey-day…The revolutionaries felt that things can change; they had hope…and everybody was very optimistic, including myself. And it was really easy to talk to women who are in the Midan who were involved in all kinds of activism…It was just very exciting…and then gradually, as you know, the revolution took a shift and the things don't become so easy. It was very difficult to actually find women activists who would like to talk about their experience in Midan, many of them found it very painful; some were even suffering from PTSD…So I realized that this sort of development in the way that I access my interviewees reflected the political scene in Egypt.” “I was trying to find something more than memory [in my book], because when I was speaking to many of the women who were involved in the uprising, who found themselves for the very first time face-to-face with state violence…I felt that there was something there that was happening during the interview, it wasn't simply that people are sitting here reminiscing or re-telling stories of the past…I could view how their bodies actually changed, their voices changed, the expressions and their eyes changed, the whole demeanor changed as they were re-telling the stories, and some of them always pointed out, you're making us remember what it was like, and it was almost as if they were reliving these experiences, so it wasn't simply just retelling a memory, it was “rememory,” actually, physically experiencing the events that took place,” said Hafez. Sherine Hafez is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California Riverside. She is the Co-Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and served as President for the Association of Middle East Anthropologists (AMEA). Hafez’s research focuses on Islamic movements and gender studies in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures. Hafez lectures on gender studies in the Middle East and Muslim majority countries, Islamic movements, and women’s Islamic activism in the uprisings in the Arab World. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Elizabeth Nugent talks about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores how polarization and repression led to different political outcomes in Tunisia and Egypt. Nugent explains, “When I started my fieldwork in Tunisia, it was clear to me again coming from Egypt with that kind of as my baseline how differently people spoke about each other and so the more I dug in the more that repression - the way in which the Ben Ali regime and the Mubarak regime repressed these different opposition groups - was very key for why these two different places ended up very differently polarized.” “It’s possible that as repression has come to touch a number of different groups in Egypt in the current moment it’s softening some of these identity politics that have been problematic in the past,” says Nugent. Nugent says, “What I find is that there are higher levels of both affective and preference polarization, here meaning negative affect in a targeted repressive environment, and lower levels of both in a widespread repressive environment. Elizabeth Nugent is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University. Her research explores the psychology of political behavior in the Middle East, with a focus on the effects of religion and repression. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Anne Marie Baylouny talks about her latest book, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explains how the recent influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon has stimulated domestic political action against these countries' governments. Baylouny explains, “So usually these governments use all kinds of groups…to blame for their faults. Oh we can't provide this. We have water shortage because of the Iraqis. This problem with the government is because of another group and they blame them for all their lack of state capacity. So here you have an overwhelming number of Syrians over a quarter of Lebanon's population and at least 10 percent of Jordan's, probably their first and second in the world for refugees per capita. And they're foreigners and a lot of them are poor and they came in in masses…So you have they have all the elements that you would expect states to be able to successfully deflect blame from themselves on to that minority or foreign group.” She goes on to say, “They [the Syrians] were welcomed very well by the Lebanese and Jordanians in the beginning. Then the honeymoon period ran out and the numbers got very large. And the Jordanians and Lebanese universally started to blame things on the Syrians…They're using too much water etc. but they didn't do the second part of scapegoating. The second part of scapegoating is when you basically dissolve responsibility from the state or government for that problem. So you blame Syrians and you go back to your couch…Instead they blamed the government said you need to provide us housing, you need to provide us better schools, you need to provide us water, electricity, you need to fix the problem. The Syrians may have caused them but you need to fix them. And they mobilized. They began mobilizing against the government.” She argues, “They [the Jordanians] needed housing…And they demanded from the government that it provide them housing. So here you have people who are clear that the fault is the Syrians…but the Syrians can't provide them housing. And later on the Syrians can't provide them water. They can't provide electricity…Because deflecting blame onto the Syrians away from the government—people can see right through that because they still need those goods to be provided. So they [the Jordanians] prioritize solutions over the psychological satisfaction of scapegoating and blaming somebody else for all your problems.” Anne Marie Baylouny is associate professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, specializing in Middle East politics, grassroots organizing, and Islam. Baylouny received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her recent work includes publications on militia governments in the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah’s media messages, and authority in ungoverned spaces. Baylouny has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards—Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl talks about his latest book, Quagmire in Civil War, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. His book explains he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices and draws upon field research on Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, structured comparisons with civil wars in Chad and Yemen, and rigorous statistical analyses of all civil wars worldwide fought between 1944 and 2006. Schulhofer-Wohl explains, “I was very interested in digging into an idea of how it was that the groups that are fighting in civil wars can become trapped in a war…There are some wars in which it looks like for whatever reason the armed groups that are fighting in them are unable to win the war. They're unable to negotiate to make a settlement and the war just drags on. But there's something about that that's different from just a war that lasts for a very long time.” He goes on to say, “The book makes the point that we kind of have a default view of entrapment and civil war that it's based on underlying characteristics of a country or a war. So the Obama administration, for example, had a view that current conflicts in the Middle East are just incredibly complicated…And these are conflicts the United States shouldn't get involved in because they're going to be overly complicated and then they're going to be something that will entrap everyone. And by taking this strategic decision making perspective, the book actually outlines an argument that's the opposite of that, which is to say it's based on the choices that are being made by the foreign states, by the armed groups fighting the war. And it's these choices that lead to quagmire—not anything particular about the nature of the country or the kind of war that's being fought.” “I'm also trying to outline an argument for quagmire that's different from what you might hear normally about foreign interference and civil wars, which is that a country is trapped in conflict because that's what the foreign backers want. You'll hear some people argue that what regional powers in the Middle East want is just to keep Libya in a permanent state of warfare or to keep Yemen in a permanent state of warfare to keep Syria like that…And what I'm saying is that that's one possibility…But I also want to understand, is it possible that through taking rational decisions based on their self-interests—that don't have to do with wanting to keep a country in a state of conflict—it might nevertheless end up that way,” said Schulhofer-Wohl . Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. His research agenda, on the conduct of civil wars, includes an empirical focus on the Middle East, but addresses questions about civil wars as a general matter, and draws on comparisons across diverse countries. Before joining the faculty at Leiden, Schulhofer-Wohl taught at the University of Virginia and as a visiting assistant professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Hiba Bou Akar talks about her latest book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Bou Akar explains, “So I start looking at the planning and how these residential complexes ended up mushrooming in an agricultural area but also next to inductees and eventually like a whole world starts opening to me about how… war displacement has shaped the housing market. There are political organizations that are fighting over territory after the war. And how planning is a tool in that conflict. It would sometimes be of negotiation and sometimes of contestation.” She goes on to say, “So the [idea of], For The War Yet to Come ends up being like this expectation of war that is either going to be like an Arab-Israeli war…or sectarian war, a regional war or whatever; that ends up shaping how people make decisions about where they live. Religious political organizations end up using this idea to keep people in strongholds. They intervene in the housing market…access to, for example, airports or to the waterfront etc...As a person who grew up in the Civil War and was personally displaced six times, I think I was haunted by the idea: What does it mean to live in a place where we were always expecting something disastrous to happen in the future?” “It was interesting to me because if you want to take a theoretical l lens I was like, people don't talk about when they think about land as Christian land you know like thinking about for example New York or other places in the world. And the fact that the land is talked about in…a religious terminology was interesting to me. And then when you map religion and sectarianism to land then anyone who is trying to just secure housing becomes like oh what is your religion, oh you're taking over , you’re Islamizing. And then you go from Islamizing for example the neighborhood to Islamizing the Middle East...It goes from one apartment or building blocks to becoming, on TV, Islamization of Lebanon…And so I got fascinated by the idea how people, without even blinking, assigned religion to land,” said Bou Akar. Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Bou Akar’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Wenner- Gren Foundation, and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). Bou Akar received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Master in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Aili Tripp talks about her latest book, Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women’s Rights, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores why autocratic leaders in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria embraced more legal reforms of women’s rights than their Middle Eastern counterparts, and how women’s rights were used to advance the political goals of these authoritarian regimes. Tripp explains, “I was interested in the fact that you have this growing divergence within the MENA region itself in terms of the adoption of women’s rights, yet people keep talking about the region as one monolith when it came to women’s rights. “The fact that women’s rights are such a central theme in north African politics. I mean nothing happens without the issue of women’s rights coming to the floor somehow as we saw at the time of independence in Algeria, as we saw after the Arab Spring in Tunisia with the debates over the constitution in 2011,” notes Tripp. Tripp says, “Why are autocrats adopting women’s rights legislation and making constitutional provisions and promoting women as leaders? In a nutshell, my argument has to do with some of the strategic interaction that goes on between the ruling parties, which in the case of Tunisia and Morocco for the time period I’m looking at are Islamist parties. Between the regime and these Islamist parties and the various Islamist movements in these countries and the interaction with women’s movements this interaction between these various actors has resulted in an unprecedented advancement in women’s rights.” Aili Mari Tripp is Wangari Maathai Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Tripp’s research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, women and peacebuilding, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. Her current research involves a comparative study of women and legal reform in North Africa. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Amr Adly talks about his latest book, Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores why market-based economic development failed to meet expectations in Egypt. “The main argument is that we have three business systems in Egypt in reference to rules formal as well as informal and mixes of the two, according to which different business establishments have been operating. And the crucial thing really is how their access to physical and financial capital has been regulated.” “The main point here is that the vast majority of private establishments, the ones that are strictly owned by private individuals, have suffered from a chronic under structuring under capitalization when it comes to access to back credit given of course the structure of the financial system in Egypt, which is very much bank-based, as well as access to land.” "One of the problems here is that you have a banking system in Egypt that is still very much controlled by the state. You have very large state-owned banks that still hold up something between one-third and forty percent of the total assets of the banking system. Despite rounds of privatization and liberalization and even without this crucial factor of the direct state ownership of the big banks, you have state regulation that is both formal as well as informal. All of these networks that have historically tied state-owned enterprises and then later on private businesses that are like crony businessmen that have been related to the successive ruling regimes in Egypt, all of these have created a regulatory environment that made it extremely hard for those who lack either initial capital or political and social capital.  Amr Adly is an assistant professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. He has also worked as a project manager at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Adly received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. He is also the author of State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Pascal Menoret talks about his latest book, Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In the book, he tells the stories of the people actively countering the Saudi state and highlights how people can organize and protest even amid increasingly intense police repression. Menoret explains, “Basically what happens in the suburbs is that it's a fixed place where people could congregate and create mass movements by the presence or the co presence of their bodies. On the street what you have is moving entities-moving devices-moving tools, automobiles that can be used to reconstitute movements to protest sometimes and to create that effect of mass that might change the political dynamic in the country.” “I was interested in looking at…what activists call Islamic action…in everyday spaces. And these big figures indeed become parts of much more grounded conversations about the meaning of, for instance, what it means to read books…what it means to read novels for young activists who gather in a high school and some of whom are interested in reading Harry Potter. That's a great challenge because they decide that you know first of all reading is a training and it's trains you to use the language to think, to speak, but it's also a way for you to get exposed to other ways to look at the world and therefore you can only make your own you know self-construction as a reader but also as an activist stronger; you become more articulate,” he explains. Menoret goes on to say, “Muslim Brothers will tend to use many more spaces to organize and to create conversations and to create numbers and to create an atmosphere in which you can actually talk about social issues. You can talk about intellectual issues, you can talk about political issues, they will use sports to do that, they would use leisure spaces…they will use the suburbs actually. They will really have a whole thinking about what it means to be living in the suburbs and to organize in suburban environments whereas the Salafis…tend to be much closer to the religious sciences right into a space that is much more exclusive in many ways…” Pascal Menoret is the Renee and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Saudi Enigma: A History (2005) and Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (2014), Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge University Press 2014), Arabia, from the Incense Road to the Oil Era (Gallimard 2010, in French), and The Saudi Enigma: A History (Zed Books 2005). An ethnographer and historian, he conducted four years of fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and has also lived in France, Yemen, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Paris 1 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Harvard University. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.