Established in 1977, the Middle East Contemporary Survey (MECS), a unique annual record of political developments in the Middle East, is acknowledged as the standard reference work on events and trends in the region. Designed to be a continuing, up-to-date reference for scholars, researchers and analysts, policymakers, students and journalists, it examines in considerable detail the rapidly changing Middle Eastern scene in all its complexity. In each volume, the material is arranged in two parts...
Bleeding Hearts: From Passionate Activism to Violent Insurgency in Egypt examines the wave of violence that broke out in Egypt in the aftermath of the 2013 military takeover against the country's first democratically elected president. Abdallah Hendawy sheds light on stories of several political activists who abandoned their commitment to nonviolence and took up arms against the state. Through multiple interviews, ethnographic observations, field work, and qualitative data analysis, Hendawy chal...
Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression an...
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Beyond the crush and frenzy of a few tourist sites, the Old City within its medieval walls remains largely unknown to visitors, its people ignored and its stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the Palestinian and other communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from past to present, highlighting stories and personalities across faiths and outlooks, it evokes the depth and cultural diversity of Palestin...
Palimpsests of Themselves (Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship, #5)
by Asad Q. Ahmed
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in English its first full translation and extended commentary. He offers detailed assessments of the technical contributions of the work,...
Children’s Wellbeing in Immigrant Families (Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, #26)
by Naomi Anne Shmuel
This book studies children's wellbeing from the perspective of Ethiopian immigrant families in Israel. It examines how the meeting of cultures within families affects relationships, language acquisition and the transmission of cultural heritage across generations after immigration. The younger generation, born in Israel or having arrived as infants, are faced with a reality very different from their parent’s childhood in Ethiopia. The book therefore addresses these key questions: What are the di...
Iranian Immigration to Israel (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Society)
by Ali Levy Ezzatyar
Exploring the fascinating history behind Iranian-Jewish immigration to Israel, this book offers a rare and untold history of one of Israel's Middle Eastern Jewish populations. Over the 20th century, thousands among Iran's Jewish community left their ancestral homes and immigrated to the Jewish State, while thousands of others remained in Iran, even after the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Using firsthand narratives, the evolution of Zionist activities and recruitment in Iran over the la...
Departures (Critical Refugee Studies, #3)
by Yen Le Espiritu, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, and Nigel Hatton
Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, ar...
As the 1998 annual World Bank assessment soberly observed: "No country in recent history, let alone one the size of Indonesia, has ever suffered such a dramatic reversal of fortune." Since the middle of 1997, we have witnessed momentous and tragic events in Indonesia. Nobody foresaw the events, and many ordinary Indonesians have experienced a substantial decline in their living standards. This book describes and analyzes Indonesia s most serious economic crisis against the general backdrop of ec...
The practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the Middle East is explored in this volume, through a unique compilation of data and perspectives from authors living and working in the region. The authors demonstrate how the long-entrenched traditions of philanthropy and generosity in Arab culture have been reinvigorated in recent years and are starting to cross-fertilize with new and more institutionalized forms of giving, advocated through advances pertaining to CSR. Using a variety...
Migration from Central Asia analyzes migration from Turkestan to Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United States and the identity formation of these people living in different countries. It also deals with younger generations and their views about homeland, sense of belonging, and identity. Using oral history methods, the book focuses on migrants from Turkestan in the 1930s. The book includes in-depth interviews as well as short surveys with those who migrated and their children. Focusing on what...
During the past seven decades, Palestine has been sealed from the Arab world and shattered into fragmented and coded areas: 1948 area, 1967 area, Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza, and A, B and C areas within the West Bank. Each area is ruled by different laws, including different roads and permits that control the mobility of Palestinians and privilege Jewish settlers. Driving in Palestine is a research-creation project by acclaimed artist Rehab Nazzal, who explores the visible indices of the politic...
A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey. “Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and...
This book examines domestic and regional geopolitical dynamics behind Turkish-Qatari relations from the past to the present. Utilizing arguments of practical geopolitical reasoning, OEzgur Pala and Khaled Al-Jaber situate their analysis of evolving relations in the contexts of Ottoman-British geopolitical rivalry in the Persian Gulf, the Turkish Republic's fluctuating relations with the Middle East until the 2000s, the AKP governments' opening to the region and finally the Arab Spring and its af...
With the creation of the modern nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa, women have been and continue to be manipulated to represent a cultural ideal of perfect womanhood. This is often greatly at odds with the realities of women's lives and aspirations. However, individual women, through careful manipulation of gender relations, often succeed in casting aside the culturally accepted bonds which diminish their lives.Even so, women in groups are deemed unacceptable unless they conform to...
Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine
Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The authors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Chapters reflect on community politics and activism, migration, orientalism, and critical race theory. Among its unique contributions, the volume provides a fresh look at Canada’s foreign policy as infor...
The Living Inca Town (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)
by Karoline Guelke
The Living Inca Town presents a rich case study of tourism in Ollantaytambo, a rapidly developing destination in the southern Peruvian Andes and the starting point for many popular treks to Machu Picchu. Tourism is generally welcomed in Ollantaytambo, as it provides a steady stream of work for local businesses, particularly those run by women. However, the obvious material inequalities between locals and tourists affect many interactions and have contributed to conflict and aggression throughout...
In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people...
The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East
by Benjamin Thomas White
This book shows which historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as 'minorities'. Why, in the years around 1920, did the concept of 'minority' suddenly become prominent in public affairs worldwide? Within a decade of World War One, the term became fundamental to public understandings of national and international politics, law, and society. Minorities (and majorities too) were taken to be an objective reality, both in the present and the past. Benjamin White use...
Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for...
In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a for...
Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri (Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema)
by Victoria Brittain
This book covers Mai Masri’s three decades documenting iconic moments of Palestinian and Lebanese linked history. Her films, unique for giving agency to her subjects, tell much about the untold, unseen people, namely women and children, who lived these experiences of war and occupation. Former Lebanese political prisoner Soha Bechara praised her feature film 3000 Nights as “the ‘Lest we forget’ of Palestine." Her focus on the social and political climates of the vivid lives of unseen people conn...