Featured Research
Mapping Non-State Actors in International Relations (Marianna Charountaki & Daniela Irrera)
This edited volume addresses the role of non-state actors (NSAs) in international relations. From their emergence in the early 20th century, entities of non-state status have played a role of increasing prominence in international politics. Scholarly work has been slow to catch up, approaching NSAs mainly through the scope of legitimacy and international law or limiting focus to NGOs, international organizations, and economic corporations.
Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic (Sevgi Adak)
In this comprehensive analysis of the anti-veiling campaigns in interwar Turkey, Sevgi Adak casts light onto the historical context within which the meanings of veiling and unveiling in Turkey were formed. By shifting the focus from the high politics of the elite to the implementation of state policies, the book situates the anti-veiling campaigns as a space where the Kemalist reforms were negotiated, compromised and resisted by societal actors.
The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Annie Tracy Samuel)
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), founded after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, is one of the most powerful and prominent but least understood organizations in Iran. In this book, Annie Tracy Samuel presents an innovative and compelling history of this organization and, by using the Iran–Iraq War as a focal point, analyzes the links between war and revolution.
Interview | Yaser Alashqar
In this interview with E-International Relations, Yaser Alashqar discusses the role of external actors in the Israel-Palestine conflict, plus the impact of normalisation deals, international aid and the election of Naftali Bennett on the conflict dynamics. Yaser Alashqar is adjunct assistant professor in the International Peace Studies MPhil programme at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.
Ferocious and Fragile: Egypt and the Myth of ‘Authoritarian Stability’ (Gennaro Gervasio & Andrea Teti)
After a brief moment during the 2010-11 Arab Uprisings in which the EU and major Western governments admitted that their support for Middle Eastern autocrats had destabilised regional states and the Mediterranean generally, those same governments quickly returned to defending allegiances with new autocrats in the name of Realpolitik and the pursuit of 'national interests'.
Decolonial Solidarity in Palestine-Israel: Settler Colonialism and Resistance from Within (Teodora Todorova)
Recent years have seen the Israeli state become ever more extreme in its treatment of Palestinians, manifested both in legislation stripping Palestinians of their rights and in the escalating scale and violence of the Israeli occupation. But this hard-line stance has in turn provoked a new spirit of dissent among a growing number of Israeli scholars and civil society activists.
Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Hedi Viterbo)
In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians.
No Bread, No Freedom, No Social Justice: How EU– Egyptian Human Rights Discourse Undermines Democracy (Gennaro Gervasio & Andrea Teti)
Conventional approaches to democratization in the Middle East take for granted the priority of some civil–political rights (e.g., voting) over others (e.g., rights of association or protest, socioeconomic rights). The discursive structure of these approaches has framed both the promotion of democracy by the European Union and regional governments’ counter-conductive reframing against that effort.
Sexuality, nationalism and the other: the Arabic literary canon between Orientalism and the Nahḍa discourse at the fin de siècle (Feras Alkabani)
This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nahḍa discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world.
Revelation in the Qur’an: A Semantic Study of the Roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y (Simon Loynes)
In Revelation in the Qur’an Simon P. Loynes presents a semantic study of the Arabic roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y in order to elucidate the modalities of revelation in the Qur’an. Through an exhaustive analysis of their occurrences in the Qur’an, and with reference to pre-Islamic poetry, Loynes argues that the two roots represent distinct occurrences, with the former concerned with spatial events and the latter with communicative.
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