POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

On this week's podcast, Elisabeth Kendall speaks about her research on poetry by militant jihadists, particularly in Yemen. "There was so much poetry being produced by militant jihadist movements— and nobody was looking at it," says Kendall. "I found it initially online, but I didn't know that the online magazines as I found were also being passed around in hard copy on the ground. And I could tell that Yemen was a real hot spot for this, possibly because being the birth place essentially of Arabic poetry. It still was an oral culture, particularly in a desert environment. So I thought I'd go there and find out what was what was actually happening and how much still resonated on the ground." Kendall is a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Middle East Peace and Security Initiative and the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. "I sneaked in a little question about poetry into [a survey of eastern Yemen in 2012-2013] where I simply asked, 'How important is poetry in your daily life?' And over 2000 tribesmen and tribeswomen, 74 percent said either 'important' or 'very important,' on a scale you know six different possible answers. And that was their daily lives. So that was really fascinating because I did not ask specifically about jihadists, but what that said to me was this is no surprise therefore that militant jihadist groups are using poetry to propagate their message when it clearly still resonates so strongly on the ground."

On this week's podcast, Alexander Thurston speaks about Boko Haram and its origins and growth. Thurston is an Assistant Professor of Teaching for African Studies Program at Georgetown University and a Fellow at the Wilson Center. His new book is Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement. "This is my attempt at a documentary history of Boko Haram. To try to draw on especially diverse written sources to reconstruct the trajectory of the movement from the time when the founders were growing up in Nigeria in the 1970s up to close to the present as it was possible to get," said Thurston. "These groups are just very hard to completely eradicate. A proto-state that they carve out can be destroyed. It may take several years, as in the case of ISIS or it may take a very short time, as in the case of Boko Haram. But then after that, you get this long term spate of terrorist attacks. And that's a lot harder to stamp out."

On this week's podcast, Laurence Louër speaks with Marc Lynch Shia Islamic movements in the Middle East. She speaks about Bahrain's situation. "It is really a case of what I call the domestication of Shia politics because Al-Wefaq was born in 2001 as a project to unify all the different strands of Shia political Islam in Bahrain. Ali Salman, who was the head of that, wanted to reconcile the Shirazi activists and the pro-Iranian activists because the two were really rivals." Louër is a research fellow at SciencePo and author of Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf.

Marc Lynch speaks with Susanne Dahlgren about Yemen. Dahlgren is the author of Contesting Realities: The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen, and is a Visiting Research Associate Professor at National University of Singapore as well as a Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. Dahlgren speaks about the history of southern Yemen and its union to become present-day Yemen in 1990. "In the beginning it was a happy union, but very soon it turned out to be very ugly politics from the perspective of the Southerners. Things went really bad in 1993– or the three years after the unity— and that led to the first inter-Yemeni war. The current war, which started in 2015 is considered by southern Yemenis as the inter-Yemeni war." "They think that the the Houthi's movement—together with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh— want to conquer South Yemen militarily. They have taken up arms in order to resist and they are working in cooperation with with the Saudi war coalition" said Dahlgren. "In Yemen, you have two very contradictory ideas about the Saudi involvement in this war. In the south, they consider that the Saudis are they allies. While in the North, it's considered an aggression."

This week's podcast explores Palestinian refugees today, with guest Nadya S. Hajj, author of Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of Property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps. "I started visiting [Palestinian refugee] camps in 2004. The camps looked really different than these impermanent types of places— and people were doing much more than surviving. They were actually thriving. Physically you could see this: over time, their homes had become more permanent structures. There were businesses. There were paved roads. There was a real estate market. There was a lot of entrepreneurship going on. And institutional literature and economics literature didn't really explain why would people do that if they knew they were in a refugee camp. Why would someone invest in the world around them?" said Hajj, assistant professor of political science at Wellesley College. "I started to think that property rights were one key tool for creating order. They served more than just an economic purpose," said Hajj. "It wasn't just about protecting assets, but the way in which Palestinians constructed property rights that became a way of enshrining their communal identity. So it served more than just protecting an economic asset. It was also about protecting the communal identity in a place that was under a lot of threat by a much more powerful host states and nationalist parties that would float through." "Camps are not just randomly strewn about individuals living in this place. Most camps replicate pre-1948 villages, so people that were neighbors prior to 1948— their families continue to remain neighbors in those neighboring villages from that same region are replicated in the camps," said Hajj. "This has good things and bad things to it. On the one hand, it's a really positive thing because you have usually shared ideas of what's appropriate behavior— and you have a shared understanding of how we've done this in the past. But there's also the flip side of that that old feuds and disputes continue to persist till this day in the camps."

On this week's podcast, Marc Lynch speaks with Toby Matthiesen about sectarianism in the Gulf, particularly looking at Saudi Arabia and Iran. "What I'm going to try to do in my new project is to look at the impact of the Iranian revolution on Shia movements— and on the regional more broadly— but also the reaction towards Iran," said Matthiesen. "I think we are living in a new era. More spaces have opened up for confrontations, and there's a stronger I 'internationalization' of particular, local conflicts— and a connection to each other, and a correction of that to the broader kind of Saudi-Iranian or Iranian-versus-a-lot-of-others rivalry, which was there to a certain extent before, but the Syrian war has just opened up." Matthiesen is a Senior Research Fellow in the International Relations of the Middle East at the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of several recent books including The Other Saudis: Shi’ism, Dissent and Sectarianism recently published by Cambridge University Press and Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't. "In the context of the Arab uprisings, and the crackdown on Shia protest movements, you have almost the whole clerical leadership of the Shia community in Saudi Arabia now backing the state line. Telling people not to protest, not to make any trouble, just stay quiet and basically work together with the ruling family. One of the only people who didn't do that was Nimr al-Nimr and he's been executed. But people from all the different movements— whether they're pro Iranian or anti-Iranian or old clerical families— more or less agree on the politics of no confrontation with the Saudi state." "What I'm trying to do is combine a kind of broad IR, and international history perspective that looks at archives around the world with interviews, and sources from the region, memoirs and publications." said Matthiesen. "History is always written from where we are right now— that's why we write history. So we can't get around that fact. But we obviously shouldn't impose narratives on the past just because we think they are relevant today."

Kevan Harris speaks about his new book, A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran. Harris is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "In the book, I lay out the main social welfare organizations— both that preceded the 1979 revolution and the ones that germinated afterwards. And then I asked the question, 'How can we explain the expansion of both social policy organizations and access to these organizations by the majority of the population because expansion of social policy and access to social welfare has grown since 1979," said Harris. "Very few scholars have looked at the institutions themselves, and historically trace the development of them. So I ask why, and how, did a particular social welfare organizations in Iran grow— and continue to be created?" "Iran is not Lebanon. Iran has a population of 80 million. You can't explain mass politics in Iran through single anecdotal stories of clientelism. We get surprises on a regular basis in Iranian politics," said Harris. "I think we need to look at the middle institutions, a mezzo level understanding of Iran and many other organizations."If we historize and look at the ways that they were created, I think we'll come up with a wider set of conceptual tools to understand why the Middle East is the way it is today."

"There are market forces that explain why jihadists succeed in civil wars— when so many other types of groups look like they should have traction on the ground— don't," says Aisha Ahmad. "In order for your movement to succeed, and you have enough money to buy the bullets and feed your foot soldiers. And so there is a logic that's taking place behind the scenes that explains why these seemingly illogical movements rise to power." "Where jihadists do well is in a vacuum in the political chaos of a failed state," says Ahmad. Ahamd is the author of Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power, which looks at financing through two sets of case studies: the Afghanistan/Pakistan cluster and Somalia. "When we look at these sorts of war economies, we need to have a holistic understanding of the kind of businesses that take place— which span both licit and illicit activities," says Ahmad. Ahmad is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, a senior fellow at Massey College, and the co-director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative and a senior researcher of the Global Justice Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Wendy Pearlman speaks on our podcast this week about her new book, We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria. "Ultimately, I was asking people, 'Tell me about your story.'" said Pearlman. "And the people I interviewed told me anything they wanted to tell me." "The book has a trajectory and has an arc. It begins with a sense of fear, intimidation, and silence— a sense of futility under authoritarianism. Then it moves through the euphoria of people participating in protest. Then it becomes increasingly dark, increasingly fragmented— and by the end there are stories of despair." Pearlman's book is structured in different sections outlining Syrians' experiences through its modern history (you can watch Pearlman's book talk at GW here). "I thought, 'What what does a reader need to know to understand Syria? What are the kinds of questions that occur to most readers about what does this regime all about?'" Pearlman said. "All the kinds of things that I thought readers might want to know— and the kinds of things from our shared political science background we know— were important parts of the story... I also found that the testimonies that could say them on their own. I just had to put it in a place that could walk the readers through the story." Pearlman is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professorship and is a faculty fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies. "So arranging the sequence was about thinking how each excerpt could connect to what went before it and also bridge to what came after. In a way that the reader would get lost, and would leave feeling like they understood Syria better— but all of it through Syrians' words, and all of it intensely profoundly human not theoretical abstractions. By individuals saying how all of this mattered for their lives, as real people."

This week's guest is Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, who is the author of a new book, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons. Braut-Hegghammer is an associate professor of political science at the University of Oslo. "The main ambition [of my book] is really to tell a history of these nuclear weapons programs and set them in the context of these regimes. One of my frustrations has been that many have discounted and suggested that the program wasn't successful— and that more broadly that authoritarian leaders will inevitably fail in their efforts to pursue nuclear weapons. Now, with North Korea, we can we can see that that doesn't seem right." "The Iraqi program was actually on the threshold of success in 1991, when the Gulf War interrupted the program. Whereas the Libyan program dwindled down until 2003, without ever coming close to any kind of success and breakthrough," Braut-Hegghammer says. "These are very different outcomes even though neither country ended up with nuclear weapons. Iraq easily could have— if Saddam had not invaded Kuwait in 1990." The Iraqi nuclear program "was managed in a very different way than I had expected. That's one of the important findings of my research is that there was much more delegation and, frankly, chaos than I had expected." "One of the fascinating discoveries was just the ways in which scientists, engineers, and officials designed Iraq's program to be difficult to oversee. They would report on it selectively, in terms of what they were achieving and not achieving, but that they would report in a way that was very technical— difficult for anyone who wasn't a scientist to decipher." The Liyan nuclear program differed from the Iraqi program. "it's a fascinating story and I suspect that the Libyan case is a unique one," says Braut-Hegghammer. "Consistently throughout this program— which started in 1970 and ended in 2003— you see that there were there was a small number of Libyan scientists who made very sound decisions, laid out plans that made sense. But any time these scientists tried to implement something, it all fell apart. It's a long history of initiatives that disintegrated as soon as someone had to try and organize something." "The main reason is that Gadhafi's project was to dismantle the state. He wanted what he called a 'stateless state.' Now, if you want a successful nuclear weapons program, you have to have functioning state institutions that can plan and launch and implement and review a program that is very complex with many different components that have to work together." "The main lesson is we can't just assume that personalist leaders will fail in these programs," says Braut-Hegghammer. "We see that the Iraqi program came close to success. When you look at North Korea today, you see a very sophisticated program."

Carter Malkasian speaks about the recent history of conflict in Iraq and how it it laid the foundation for the Islamic State to flourish. His new book is Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State. "The question confronting every tribal leader in Anbar was: 'How do I stand up against the Islamic state if that means siding with the government— and siding against Islam?'" Malkasian also speaks about the way the military action has changed— and what lessons we should take from Iraq. "I think if you talk to generals in the military today, you would get a much greater degree of skepticism about what one can attain. There is more worry about, 'If we're doing here is going to last? Can there be success?' I think you have much more skepticism of, 'You can have complete victory.'" "I think this should give us pause for thinking about future interventions. So we're going into an intervention. We should be thinking, 'Well, if we're going to be putting troops there, we're going to have something there for a long time.' That means the cost— even if it's small— every year, over time we're really talking about a decade or more here that cost is going to go up. And when you see that that should make us question if we should do it in the first place that should make us question if whatever is at stake in this conflict whatever attack we think is going to occur and the United States that we should make a careful judgment is is it really that bad to warrant this kind of commitment or a very long commitment. Can't we manage this? Can't we be resilient?" "We should not assume we will achieve victory in those cases, where we think the threat is big enough we need to do something about it. We should be looking to strategies that are thrifty that can be employed over a long time— versus something that's been fairly expensive."

"The fact that Qatar is, after all, a tiny state— but clearly with a lot of leverage that can amplify their message." Kristian Coates Ulrichsen speaks about the crisis within the GCC with Marc Lynch in our first POMEPS podcast in the launch of our fall season. Ulrichsen is a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston. His latest book is The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics and Policy-Making. Ulrichsen explains this summer's diplomatic showdown in historical context. "We've been here before. Like many other people, I was taken quite by surprise when this whole crisis erupted again. I had thought that the Qatari decision in September 2015 to send a thousand troops to Yemen signified the return of Qatar to the GCC fold."

Caitlin Talmadge talks about her her book 'The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes.' Her book works to explain why authoritarian militaries sometimes fight very well―and the opposite. Talmadge is an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. "In my book, I present a different argument noting that we really have to look— not only at regimes military capabilities an external threats that it faces— but we have to look at the internal threats that may be facing a particular regime. In particular, in situations where authoritarian regimes consider their own military perhaps to be a liability because the military actually has the ability to overthrow the regime in a coup." In the podcast, Talmadge goes into detail on the dynamics of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and what it says about each country's governments.

Neil Ketchley speaks about his new book Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring. Ketchley is a Lecturer in Middle East Politics, King's College London. "The book really tries to make a contribution by drawing on a range of new and unique data sources and methods— from analyzing video footage of crowd dynamics at Tahrir, police radio transcripts from the formative early days of the mobilization, to event data from Arabic-language newspapers. In terms of the kind of a conceptual contribution, the argument is really geared around an assumption and belief: that the dynamics of street level mobilization— and contentious politics more generally— are really formative in their own right. The book argues that the ways in which Egyptians banded together and ousted Mubarak were not some kind of manifestations of cheering grievances, but also powerfully constituted the postman-Mubarak process." "And if you want to understand the kind of key questions and episodes, you really have to take street politics very seriously."

How did the idea of a unified global Muslim community come about? That's the question Cemil Aydin and Marc Lynch tackle in this week's podcast. Aydin's new book explores the how the world's 1.5 billion Muslims have become seen as a single religious/political bloc. "In many ways, I wanted to engage with the contemporary discussions of Muslim unity, Muslim solidarity or Muslim exceptionalism by going back to the last 200 years to try to understand the genealogy and the roots of the idea of Muslims constituting a global community and a shared political project," says Aydin, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his book, Aydin makes the argument that up until the 19th century, there really was no Muslim world. "That doesn't mean there were many different Muslims in different parts of the world. They have always had different global or regional imaginations— but it doesn't match with our current conceptions of a Muslim world extending from Senegal or Morocco to Indonesia. Different Muslim legal scholars may have categorizations about the 'land of Islam' versus the 'land of the land of non-Muslims,'" says Aydin. "But these are legal classifications. We need to ask, 'Who made them?' or 'Who read them and how they applied them.'The fact that there were such legal categories doesn't mean that these categories are almost like a party program or a doctrine that every Muslim child had to read.... and memorize it and imagine the world accordingly." "We have to account for the fact that Muslims lived in empires— and different empires and different empires of the world to work with. There were so many different Caliphates." Aydin sees the history he just wrote about reflected in current events. "Publishing this book after Donald Trump is also very ironic in the sense that Trump's Muslim ban— or a kind of 'new' Islamophobia, which actually originates from the 1980s onward, after Salman Rushdie appears— again created the kind of outer boundaries of the Muslim world. The new racism against Muslims actually creates a context for Muslims to defend themselves. So I have one message for Muslims: ask for your rights, whether in America or Europe or other places, without being trapped by poisonous, bad narratives. Sometimes they think that the old narrative of Muslim solidarity to preserve themselves, or to negotiate with the colonial powers, might actually not serve their interests, but further try to 'racialize' them." "There was an assumption that only Muslim solidarity could help Muslims, which created the counter-narrative that Muslims are almost isolated from the rest of humanity. So I try to think about these symbiotic relationship between racism against Muslims in the West and the Muslims or Muslim's own pan-Islamic thinking that their solidarity is needed to empower them." By showing how deconstruction this is, "We can think differently. We can imagine a different future. That doesn't mean that Muslims don't have a right to imagine a politics based on their religious values. As a Muslim, I also do that— some of my values come from the example of Prophet Mohammad and others. But that shouldn't be a trap. Some of my values also come from the examples of Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela. So why am I only thinking that they will only come from a specified, narrow notion of religion?"