Digest of Middle East Studies最新文献

Sign language is significant in its linguistic complexity and sociocultural values to its users. The linguistic situation of sign languages in the Middle East is controversial. For Arab deaf communities, each country has a rich and complex national sign language without the need for a superior, more standard unifying Arabic sign language (ArSL). There have been attempts to unify sign languages by creating ArSL. This initiative has been mostly taken by nondeaf persons and has been met with opposition and resistance. This paper investigates sign languages in Kuwait and the attitudes towards both Kuwaiti Sign Language (KSL) and ArSL from both deaf individuals and sign language translators/teachers using surveys, informal interviews, and fieldwork visits. The research question is: What sign language would the deaf community and sign language interpreters/teachers in Kuwait choose (KSL, ArSL, or both) to better serve the deaf community. This paper is designed to uncover the impact of language policies on communities' representations of self and explore the richness and complexity of national sign languages that can be underestimated by language policymakers. The findings of this study indicate a preference for KSL or the use of both KSL and ArSL, but not ArSL alone.

A leader's wife can be a key player in consolidating his authoritarianism through her public diplomacy activities. Taking the example of Egypt's former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak (1981–2011), this article demonstrates how her role in public diplomacy framed her as a “modern” woman with a mission of “modernizing” women or the country's whole population. The modernization model adopted in these frames presumes the need for agents to transform “traditional” societies into “modern” societies and the need for agents to build more networks of collaboration with the “West.” The second section of the article focuses on political instrumentality, showing how former President Hosni Mubarak attempted to look good, to look democratic, and to look useful to his allies. This process was partly organized by Mrs. Mubarak herself, who used her public diplomacy roles as opportunities and resources to build a personality cult drawn on glorifying herself and aggrandizing her activities.

International relations literature generally tells us that donor countries see foreign aid as a key instrument of foreign policy to promote political interests. According to research, donor countries usually hope to get favorable voting at the United Nations (UN) arena in return, meaning that the motivation for foreign aid is not so altruistic. This article examines these claims and discusses the link between foreign aid, bilateral relations, and voting patterns in the UN General Assembly while focusing on Israeli foreign aid to five East African countries, using data on Israel's foreign aid and data on voting patterns from 2012 to 2021. The results testify that Israel foreign aid has helped to promote ties with Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania, but has not helped to promote voting patterns in favor of Israel. The results reveal a duality according to which the bilateral relations between Israel and East African countries have improved, but there has been no improvement in their voting patterns in a way that raises questions about the success level of using foreign aid as a tool to promote a favorable UN voting.

This article assesses the prevalence and implications of the research foci methodological nationalism, methodological globalism, and transnationalism in publications regarding the 2011 Arab uprisings. We propose a new typology that contrasts state-centered methodological nationalism with the cosmopolitan lens of methodological globalism as two opposite ends of a spectrum. Transnationalism is conceptualized in between these two, due to its sensitivity to multiple localities and cross-border variables. We compare the merits and limits of these three research foci through quantitative research and content analysis. Our systematic review of one decade of scholarship on the Arab uprisings suggests a consistent trend toward the dominance of methodologically nationalist research approaches in Middle Eastern studies. This is surprising because the multilocal nature of the Arab uprisings suggests that it can best be analyzed transnationally. This article, therefore, critically discusses the methodological nationalist bias to better understand and illustrate the trend. We conclude by highlighting some comparative advantages offered by transnational perspectives on actors and processes in the Arab uprisings and its aftermath.

We document the contribution of Islamic finance development to economic growth by studying a global sample of countries engaged in providing Islamic financial services. Fifteen countries are included in the sample based on significant Islamic banking share in total domestic banking assets. Results are documented through the application of the Panel regression (EGLS) method for the period 2001–2020. Findings suggest a positive contribution of the Islamic Financial Services Industry (IFSI) to economic growth in sample countries in multiple regression settings. Additionally, a range of control variables, including domestic credit to the private sector, inflation, and trade openness, contribute significantly to economic growth. We recommend the creation of a conducive environment for the promotion of IFSI on account of the built-in stability feature and positive contribution to economic growth. We also recommend overall development in the financial sector of selected economies, including credit availability to the private sector and trade openness. Our study helps in understanding the dynamics of economic growth in economies with a dual banking system (conventional & Islamic). This article contributes to the literature by studying a larger sample of countries engaged in the practice of Islamic finance and considering the significance of the market share of assets under IFSI.

The funeral ceremonies of female fighters are a relatively recent phenomenon that gained popularity in Kurdish politics in Turkey in the early 2000s and after the 2011 uprisings in Syria. As a sociocultural rite, these funerals have become a spectacular site, a political means, and a symbolic investment serving an intersectional agenda pursuing Kurdish national and gender-egalitarian aspirations simultaneously. The funerals provide a ground for mobilizing women to claim symbolic authority in public and inscribe women as nation builders to the notion of nation. Women undertaking this intersectional task through national discourse garnered significant academic interest in the national dimension of the ceremonies. However, the emphasis on the national aspect overshadowed the gendered strategy the ceremonies signify. This article investigates the gender aspect of funerals to draw attention to the use of national discourse to subvert patriarchal dynamics within society, highlighting the role of national struggle in women's pursuit of liberation from social oppression. Therefore, it speaks to the scholarship focused on gender in nationalist endeavors and revisits the discussions on gender-nation relations by focusing on national discourse instrumentalization serving the gender agenda. The analysis reveals the intricate dynamics between gender and nation and how they intersect in pursuing women's liberation.

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

Since 2017 Jordan has been diversifying its alignments while its relations with its traditional backers have become tenser. Drawing upon the existing literature that explains Jordan's alignment choices, this article aims to understand Jordan's diversification of its alignments and how they evolved in the post-Arab Uprisings era. It is argued that although the regime security argument and the linkage between external and internal threats for explaining Jordan's alignment decisions have been very useful, to take these arguments further, there is a need to unpack regime security. The article, thus, introduces the importance of the content of the threat and from whom it is perceived to understand this complex interaction between external and domestic threat perceptions and how that interaction affects Jordan's alignment choices.

This article discusses the changing relations between the United States and Turkey in light of Turkey's contemporary foreign policy that often challenges American interests. More specifically, it adopts a comparative approach to examine the variables that determine the course of US reaction when unwanted policy shifts take place in the Middle East. To this end, apart from Turkey, the article examines two more cases: US relations with Egypt in the 1950s, and with Iran right before, during and after the 1979 revolution. The comparative analysis reveals that the case of contemporary Turkey has been more similar to the historical case of Egypt, which explains why Washington has been adopting (and is more likely to continue doing so) a “wait-and-see” approach vis-à-vis Ankara. However, domestic changes in Turkey, though not as abrupt and radical as in Iran, remain significant and may have a deeper impact on US–Turkish relations in the future.

In the course of the Syrian Civil War, prominent former Syrian Regime politicians, human rights observers, and foreign observers have accused the Syrian Regime of committing genocide against the country's Sunni majority. This article views these accusations as part of a wider politicization of genocide, and instead progresses beyond them to outline the case for an alternative “framing” of large-scale atrocities committed against civilians. It accordingly proposes strategic displacement, or the deliberate large-scale uprooting and dispersal of established communities for tactical and strategic purposes, as a preferable and more sustainable framework of engagement and analysis, and seeks to more clearly distinguish it from “ethnic cleansing” with the aim of demonstrating and underlining its unique contribution to the analysis and understanding of violent conflict. This has two benefits—first, it provides a different basis for conceptual and theoretical engagement that makes it possible to view mass atrocity as a tactical innovation in response to conflict exigencies; and second, it draws attention to internal displacement, an aspect of the conflict that has been repeatedly overlooked by international observers.