Ewan Stein

Islamism and the state after the Arab uprisings: Between people power and state power

This paper examines the trajectories of different Islamist trends in the light of the Arab uprisings. It proposes a distinction between statist and non-statist Islamism to help understand the multiplicity of interactions between Islamists and the state, particularly after 2011. It is outlined how statist Islamists (Islamist parties principally) can contribute to the stabilization and democratization of the state when their interactions with other social and political actors facilitate consensus building in national politics. By contrast when these interactions are conflictual, it has a detrimental impact on both the statist Islamists, and the possibility of democratic politics at the national level. Non statist-Islamists (from quietist salafi to armed jihadi) who prioritize the religious community over national politics are directly impacted by the interactions between statist Islamists and the state, and generally tend to benefit from the failure to build a consensus over democratic national politics. Far more than nationally-grounded statist Islamists, non-statist Islamists shape and are shaped by the regional dynamics on the Arab uprisings and the international and transnational relations between the different countries and conflict areas of the Middle East. The Arab uprisings and their aftermath reshaped pre-existing national and international dynamics of confrontation and collaboration between Islamists and the state, and between statist and non-statists Islamists, for better (Tunisia) and for worse (Egypt).

Revolution or Coup? Egypt's Fraught Transition

In retrospect, the January 2011 revolution in Egypt appears to have amounted to an intra-regime coup, with the military faction prevailing over a rival business faction. The full story is more complex.

Beyond Arabism vs. sovereignty: relocating ideas in the international relations of the Middle East

This article critiques constructivist approaches to the international relations of the Middle East and sets out an alternative interpretation of the role of ideas based on political economy and the sociology of knowledge. It cautions against using constructivism as a way of ‘building bridges’ between IR and Middle East Studies and disputes the claim that the norms of ‘Arabism’ as a putative regional identity are in contradiction with those of sovereignty. The article shows that this assumption is based on the combined influences of modernisation theory and Orientalist assumptions about the power and continuity of regional culture that have persisted in Middle East IR. This is despite the fact that there is no reason to believe the Arabs constitute a more ‘natural’ nation than do the Syrians, Iraqis or Egyptians. The political role and resonance of ideas can be better established by viewing the modern history of the Middle East in terms of domestic structure and social change, and in particular emphasising the role of rising middle classes in revolutionary nationalist movements. The findings of this article raise questions for the utility of ‘moderate’ constructivist interpretations of International Relations as a whole.

Studying Islamism after the Arab Spring

This intervention argues that the events associated with the ‘Arab Spring’, particularly in Egypt, raise important questions for the study of political Islam as a discrete phenomenon or uniquely resonant set of ideas in Muslim societies. It stresses the need for a better understanding of how specific groups utilize Islamist ideas in reshaping the collective imagination over time, and how these processes in turn affect the popularity, strategies and political behaviour of state and non-state actors.

Intellectuals and Political Change in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

This article introduces the special issue on Intellectual dynamics in the modern Middle East. It discusses key themes of the contributions, including intellectuals as social and political actors, intellectuals, power and the state, and history, tradition and regional temporality.

A: Reviews: Modern History and Politics

There are ten contributors to this study of ‘regionalism’ in Iraq which sets out to challenge the conventional wisdom on the country’s structure and the likely impact of ethnic and religious differences on its future in the post Saddam era. As Reidar Visser, one of the joint editors explains in his introduction, the tendency of most commentators and indeed historians is to ‘employ ethnic lenses for reading Iraqi politics’. In some cases this is an attempt to simplify the complex nature of Iraqi society to the non-specialist at a time of intense widespread public interest in the country, but more generally it betrays a basic misunderstanding of what makes Iraq tick. This ‘erroneous ethnic stereotype’, according to Visser, is based on a misreading of Ottoman Iraq, out of which the modern Iraqi state was created by the British as part of their ‘rearrangement’ of the former Ottoman territories in the immediate aftermath of the first world war. Thus in ‘Western academic circles’ the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul was categorised as historically ‘Kurdish’, Baghdad as ‘Sunni Arab’ and Basra ‘Shiite Arab’; a gross over simplification given that Baghdad had a majority of Shia, Basra a significant Sunni presence and Mosul a mixture of Arabs, including many Christians, Turkmens as well as Kurds. Much of this misrepresentation sprang from inaccurate sketch maps relied on by Western commentators which misplaced the old provincial boundaries and over simplified the ethnic divisions. Visser is also at pains to demolish the widespread belief that ‘Iraq’ was an invented name for a purely artificial creation. It was, as I have mentioned, the British which defined the boundaries of the modern state, but as Visser points out, the name ‘Iraq’ has long been attached to much of the land mass within its present official frontiers. Persian travellers in the eighteenth century referred to ‘Iraq’ and Basrawi historians in the early nineteenth century referred to ‘Basra and all of Iraq’. Similarly in the Mosul of the 1890s there are references as it being ‘part of the region of Iraq’. Against this background the other essayists look at different aspects of the historical background to modern Iraq and provide a detailed examination of the significance of regionalism in individual provinces throughout the country. The position of Baghdad and how ‘to fit it in’ is one essay. Richard Schofield has contributed a particularly interesting account of Britain’s historic interest in the Gulf and its subsequent intervention in Iraq as part of the Franco-Britannic carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. Alistair Northedge goes back to pre-Ottoman times, mentioning that the name ‘Iraq’was used to identify the Tigris/Euphrates alluvial plains since the eighth century (AD); and indeed Saddam Hussein himself exploited the idea of ‘ancient Mesopotamia’ as a source of Iraqi identity. Modern, twentieth century (Arab) nationalism and the concept of the nation state as popularised in the nineteenth century overlaid earlier notions of regionalism, but did not destroy them. ‘Civis Iraqus sum’ or indeed ‘I am anArab’ became a heady concept, but you could still say British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, August 2009 36(2), 299–333