Editor's introduction—January 2024

Abstract

This issue of the Digest of Middle East Studies presents quite a diverse range of scholarship. We are very pleased to publish in this issue a fascinating study of gender and Kurdish nationalism, a deep examination of comparative methodology, two interesting articles on foreign relations involving Jordan and Israel respectively, and a detailed investigation of the relationship between Islamic finance and economic growth using global data. As always, the journal's offerings situate research on the Middle East within important academic and policy contexts and reflect the work of an international community of scholars across multiple disciplines.

The first article in this issue is Yunus Abakay's “Kurdish Gender Politics: Funeral Ceremonies of Female Fighters.” This study explains the recently developed role of women in leading the funerals of women who have fallen in combat; in taking on this new role, they challenge and disrupt a gendered dynamic that is both socially entrenched and closely linked to the nationalist struggle. This shift has important implications for Kurdish national identity, gender, and the relationship between the two.

In “Mapping Methodological Nationalism in Middle Eastern Studies: Towards a Transnational Understanding of the 2011 Arab Uprisings?” Jonas Nabbe, Ward Vloeberghs, and Maryse Kruithof evaluate the dominant methodologies used in the now more than decade's worth of studies of the Arab Spring/Arab Uprising events. They find that methodologically nationalist approaches dominate the work in this area, but argue that our field would be better served by transnationalist methodological approaches that can account for both cross-national trends and local specificity. The article offers a deep review, both quantitatively and in content analysis, of the wealth of existing studies of the Arab Uprisings and contributes a new understanding of the value of careful methodological choices.

Meliha Altunisik and Nur Köprülü's study of Jordanian foreign policy, “The Quest to End Marginalization: Jordan's Diversifying Alignments in the Post Arab-Spring Era,” examines the interests and decisions of the Jordanian state in the wake of the varied effects of the Arab Spring and the more recent Abraham Accords and some regional powers' normalization of relations with Israel. The authors argue that Jordan's choices with regard to regional alignment are a response to the particular nature and source of perceived threats both domestic and external; the interaction of these perceived threats shapes the country's policy choices.

In “Foreign Aid and Bilateral Relations: the Israel-East Africa Case,” Yaron Salman examines Israel's use of foreign aid as a tool for developing bilateral relations with several countries in East Africa. Although this type of aid is usually considered a means of achieving foreign policy goals of the donor country, particularly in casting votes in the United Nations framework, Salman makes the interesting finding that in these cases, the aid served to develop ties between Israel and the recipient countries without however producing an outcome of favorable votes for Israel at the UN. This calls into question whether such aid is in fact a reliable tool for achieving this political goal.

Finally, Muhammad Hanif, Mohammed Chaker, and Ariba Sabah offer a detailed examination of global data in assessing the degree to which the development of Islamic finance contributes to economic growth. In “Islamic Finance and Economic Growth: Global Evidence,” the authors' analysis shows that the Islamic financial services industry has a positive effect on economic growth in the sample countries and thus could be a worthwhile avenue for development. Their analysis and findings contribute to an improved understanding of the dynamics of growth in countries that have a combination of conventional and Islamic banking, an important subject both within the Middle East and beyond.

As always we are grateful for the contributions of our many expert peer reviewers. The process of double-blind peer review is sometimes lengthy, but our peer reviewers have been generous with their feedback in ways that are enormously valuable both to authors themselves and to our collective shared enterprise of research and publication. We are fortunate to have excellent reviewers and authors contributing to the Digest of Middle East Studies, as well as the essential work of editorial assistant Misha Datskovsky, and we look forward this year to continuing to bring our readers a wealth of new and interesting research and writing.