Download or read book Arabia Incognita written by Sheila Carapico and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yemen is an intriguing, strategically located country that is the perennial "poor relation" of the wealthy oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and has been plagued by deadly conflict since early 2015. In 2011, it saw a broad eruption of the mass protests associated with the "Arab Spring." But four years later, that popular movement was largely over-run by a series of deadly conflicts, stoked from outside by a lengthy, lethal military intervention led by neighboring Saudi Arabia. Arabia Incognita helps readers understand Yemen's unfolding crisis by tracing the country's modern history from the strong anti-imperial movement of the 1960s through the present complex of conflicts. The "dispatches" in this anthology, originally published in Middle East Report, were chosen by renowned Yemen expert Dr. Sheila Carapico.Arabia Incognita is published in collaboration with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), which has published Middle East Report since 1971."
Download or read book Arabia Incognita written by Sheila Carapico and published by . This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of articles on Yemen.
Download or read book Arabia Incognita written by Sheila Carapico and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Yemen in the Shadow of Transition written by Stacey Philbrick Yadav and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to a diplomatic stalemate and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s civil actors work every day to build peace in fragmented local communities across the country. This book shows how their efforts relate to longstanding justice demands in Yemeni society, and details three decades of alternating elite indifference toward, or strategic engagement with, questions of justice. Exploring the transformative impact of the 2011 uprising and Yemenis’ substantive wrestling with questions of justice in the years that followed, leading Yemen scholar Stacey Philbrick Yadav shows how the transitional process was ultimately overtaken by war, and explains why features of the transitional framework nevertheless remain a central reference point for civil actors engaged in peacebuilding today. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, everyday peacebuilding has become a new site for justice work, as an arena in which civil actors enjoy agency and social recognition. Drawing on seventeen years of field research and interviews with civil actors, Yadav positions Yemen’s non-combatants not–or not only–as victims of conflict, but as political agents imagining and enacting the justice they wish to see.
Download or read book Music in Arabia written by Issa Boulos and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music in Arabia extends and challenges existing narratives of the region's distinctive but understudied music to reveal diverse and dynamic music cultures rooted in centuries-old heritage. Contributors to Music in Arabia bring a critical eye and ear to the contemporary soundscape, musical life, and expressive culture in the Gulf region. Including work by leading scholars and local authorities, this collection presents fresh perspectives and new research addressing why musical expression is fundamental to the area's diverse, transnational communities. The volume also examines music circulation as a commodity, such as with the production of early recordings, the transnational music industry, the context of the Arab Spring, and the region's popular music markets. As a bonus, readers can access a linked website containing audiovisual examples of the music, dance, and expressive culture introduced throughout the book. With the work of resident scholars and heritage practitioners in conversation with that of researchers from the United States and Europe, Music in Arabia offers both context and content to clarify how music articulates identity and nation among multiethnic, multiracial, and multinational populations.
Download or read book Armies of Arabia written by Zoltan Barany and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Armies of Arabia is the first comprehensive analysis of the Gulf monarchies' armed forces, including their political, social, and economic characteristics, foreign relations, and battleground performance. The Arabian Peninsula is among the most strategically and economically important areas in the world, but its militaries remain terra incognita. In Armies of Arabia - the first book to comprehensively analyze the Gulf monarchies' armed forces - Zoltan Barany explains their notorious ineffectiveness with a combination of political-structural and sociocultural factors. Drawing on over 150 interviews and meticulous multidisciplinary research, Barany paints a fascinating portrait of Arabia's armies from Ibn Saud's Ikhwan to the present. He explores the methods ruling families employ to ensure their armies' loyalty, examines the backgrounds and career trajectories of soldiers and officers, and explains the monarchies' reliance on mercenaries and the enduring importance of tribal networks. Even though no other world region spends more on security, Arabia's armies remain ineffective because of an absence of meritocracy, the domination of personal connections over institutional norms, insipid leadership, a casual work ethic, and training that lacks intensity, frequency, and up-to-date scenarios. Massive weapons acquisitions are primarily pay-offs to the US for protecting them and have resulted in bloated and inappropriate arsenals and large-scale corruption. Barany explains why the Gulf Cooperation Council has been a squandered opportunity and examines the kingdoms' military relationships with the Arab world and beyond. The performance of the Saudi-led coalition's disastrous war in Yemen starkly illustrates the Gulf armies' humiliating combat record. The book concludes with thoughts on waste (of human potential, resources, institutions) as a dominant theme of Gulf military affairs, considers likely changes in response to long-term weakening demand for oil, and suggests ways in which the armies' effectiveness could be raised. Chock-full of insights and stories from the field and written with a general audience in mind, Armies of Arabia will be essential reading for anyone interested in military affairs and Middle Eastern politics, society, and international relations.
Download or read book South Yemen s Independence Struggle written by Anne-Linda Amira Augustin and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold firsthand account of one of the persistent Arab uprisings, in Yemen At its beginning in 2007, the Southern Movement in South Yemen was a loose merger of different people, most of them former army personnel and state employees of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) who were forced from their jobs after the war in 1994, only four years after the unification between the PDRY and the Yemen Arab Republic. This bold ethnographic account of a persistent Arab uprising, in a rarely studied corner of the Middle East, explores why the Southern Movement has grown so tremendously during the last decade, and how it developed from a primarily social movement demanding social rights into a mass protest movement claiming independence for a state that had long vanished from the world map. Anne-Linda Amira Augustin asks why so many young people born after 1990 joined the movement and demanded the re-establishment of a state that they had never themselves experienced. At the core of South Yemeni resistance lies the transmission from generation to generation of a dominant counternarrative, which may be seen as the continuation and rehabilitation of the PDRY’s national narrative. This narrative, amplified through everyday communication in families and neighborhoods, but also by media-makers, journalists, school and university teachers, civil society actors, and by the movement’s activists, opposes the national-unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen and intensifies the demands for an independent state.
Download or read book Beyond Exception written by Ahmed Kanna and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-15 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the nearly two decades that they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for this book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a "field" that is marked by such representations. The three focus on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. They analyze what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies they study. They propose ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. They ask: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central rather than peripheral or exceptional to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The authors explore how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production.
Download or read book Arab Family Studies written by Suad Joseph and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family remains the most powerful social idiom and one of the most powerful social structures throughout the Arab world. To engender love of nation among its citizens, national movements portray the nation as a family. To motivate loyalty, political leaders frame themselves as fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters to their clients, parties, or the citizenry. To stimulate production, economic actors evoke the sense of duty and mutual commitment of family obligation. To sanctify their edicts, clerics wrap religion in the moralities of family and family in the moralities of religion. Social and political movements, from the most secular to the most religious, pull on the tender strings of family love to recruit and bind their members to each other. To call someone family is to offer them almost the highest possible intimacy, loyalty, rights, reciprocities, and dignity. In recognizing the significance of the concept of family, this state-of-the-art literature review captures the major theories, methods, and case studies carried out on Arab families over the past century. The book offers a country-by-country critical assessment of the available scholarship on Arab families. Sixteen chapters focus on specific countries or groups of countries; seven chapters offer examinations of the literature on key topical issues. Joseph’s volume provides an indispensable resource to researchers and students, and advances Arab family studies as a critical independent field of scholarship.
Download or read book Counter Narratives written by M. Al-Rasheed and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-17 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saudi Arabia and Yemen are two countries of crucial importance in the Middle East and yet our knowledge about them is highly limited, while typical ways of looking at the histories of these countries have impeded understanding. Counter-Narratives brings together a group of leading scholars of the Middle East using new theoretical and methodological approaches to cross-examine standard stories, whether as told by Westerners or by Saudis and Yemenis, and these are found wanting. The authors assess how grand historical narratives such as those produced by states and colonial powers are currently challenged by multiple historical actors, a process which generates alternative narratives about identity, the state and society.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History written by Jens Hanssen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
Download or read book Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula written by Katherine Hennessey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the turn of the millennium, the Arabian Peninsula has produced a remarkable series of adaptations of Shakespeare. These include a 2007 production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in Kuwait in 1898; a 2011 performance in Sharjah of Macbeth, set in 9th-century Arabia; a 2013 Yemeni adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, in which the Shylock figure is not Jewish; and Hamlet, Get Out of My Head, a one-man show about an actor’s fraught response to the Danish prince, which has been touring the cities of Saudi Arabia since 2014. This groundbreaking study surveys the surprising history of Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, situating the current flourishing of Shakespearean performance and adaptation within the region’s complex, cosmopolitan, and rapidly changing socio-political contexts. Through first-hand performance reviews, interviews, and analysis of resources in Arabic and English, this volume brings to light the ways in which local theatremakers, students, and scholars use Shakespeare to address urgent regional issues like authoritarianism, censorship, racial discrimination and gender inequality.
Download or read book The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution written by Vijay Prashad and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird's-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. ÒThe Arab Spring was defeated neither in the byways of Tahrir Square nor in the souk of Aleppo,Ó he explains. ÒIt was defeated roundly in the palaces of Riyadh and Ankara as well as in Washington, DC and Paris.Ó Ê The heart of this book explores the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and LebanonÑcountries where ISIS emerged and is thriving. It is here that the story of the region rests. What would a post-ISIS Middle East look like? Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies? Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions.Ê
Download or read book Archive Wars written by Rosie Bsheer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s efforts to construct and disseminate a historical narrative to legitimize its rule. The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites’ project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state’s response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation. Praise for Archive Wars “An instant classic. With incredible insight, creativity, and courage, Rosie Bsheer peels away the political and institutional barriers that have so long mystified others seeking to understand Saudi Arabia. Bsheer tells us remarkable new things about the exercise and meaning of power in today’s Saudi Arabia.” —Toby Jones, Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia “There are now two distinct eras in the writing of Saudi Arabian history: before Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars and after.” —Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft “Archive Wars explores with conceptual brilliance and historical aplomb the various forms of historical erasure central not just to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but to all modern states. In a finely-grained analysis, Rosie Bsheer rethinks the significance of archives, historicism, capital accumulation, and the remaking of the built environment. A must-read for all historians concerned with the materiality of modern state formation.” —Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis, author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
Download or read book Desert Kingdom written by Toby Craig Jones and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil and water, and the science and technology used to harness them, have long been at the heart of political authority in Saudi Arabia. Oil’s abundance, and the fantastic wealth it generated, has been a keystone in the political primacy of the kingdom’s ruling family. The other bedrock element was water, whose importance was measured by its dearth. Over much of the twentieth century, it was through efforts to control and manage oil and water that the modern state of Saudi Arabia emerged. The central government’s power over water, space, and people expanded steadily over time, enabled by increasing oil revenues. The operations of the Arabian American Oil Company proved critical to expansion and to achieving power over the environment. Political authority in Saudi Arabia took shape through global networks of oil, science, and expertise. And, where oil and water were central to the forging of Saudi authoritarianism, they were also instrumental in shaping politics on the ground. Nowhere was the impact more profound than in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where the politics of oil and water led to a yearning for national belonging and to calls for revolution. Saudi Arabia is traditionally viewed through the lenses of Islam, tribe, and the economics of oil. Desert Kingdom now provides an alternative history of environmental power and the making of the modern Saudi state. It demonstrates how vital the exploitation of nature and the roles of science and global experts were to the consolidation of political authority in the desert.
Download or read book Making Space for the Gulf written by Arang Keshavarzian and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space—an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests. Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures—the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power—and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people—migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics written by Larbi Sadiki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 795 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East. It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write–speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity. Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).
