Lorenzo Kamel

Arab Spring: The Role of the Peripheries

The emerging literature on the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has largely focused on the evolution of the uprisings in cities and power centres. In order to reach a more diversified and in-depth understanding of the ‘Arab Spring’, this article examines how peripheries have reacted and contributed to the historical dynamics at work in the Middle East and North Africa. It rejects the idea that the ‘Arab Spring’ is a unitary process and shows that it consists of diverse ‘springs’ which differed in terms of opportunity structure, the strategies of a variety of actors and the outcomes. Looking at geographical, religious, gender and ethnic peripheries, it shows that the seeds for changing the face of politics and polities are within the peripheries themselves.

Arab Spring: A Decentring Research Agenda

This article calls for a decentring research agenda and serves as a reminder to look beyond the centres when seeking to understand attempted or accomplished processes of transformation. The Arab Spring is not a unitary whole but part of a variety of processes which differs in terms of space (diverse countries, diverse areas in countries), time (the Ghedim Izik protests in Western Sahara started in October 2010, while protests in the Rif are still ongoing), substance (demands for civil and political rights, equality rights, material claims, autonomy), strategies (from violence to apathy), involved actors (social movements, civil society organizations or individual actors) and outcomes (from regime repression to empowerment of peripheries).

Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter

Thus we get Polka’s own credo that life is really about affirmation and love, and indeed that “Caritas vincit Omnia,” which lines appear in the second to the last sentence in the book. Whether this was ever or always or never Nietzsche’s intention is, toward the end of this work, beside the point, because Polka has been constructing, through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wagner, and Nietzsche, his own understanding and his own philosophy of Christian faith, which in the end is more Kierkegaardian than anything else. The work is well worth reading for the insights it brings to the meaning of faith as well as the nature of modernity more generally.

Israel and a Palestinian State: Redrawing Lines?

On November 5, 1904, Leo Amery (1873–1955), later an under-sec-retary in David Lloyd George’s (1863–1945) national government, pointed out to Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) that it would be impossible to put an end to the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia until “all those regions have been fully developed and till our boundaries march side by side in the same fashion that boundaries do in Europe” (Amery 1904).1 More than one century later it is becoming increasingly common to read academic and journalistic analyses aiming at reconsidering the historical role played by Western powers in the Eastern Mediterranean area by imposing borders and a state system designed by the West. In a recent article titled “Stop Blaming Colonial Borders for the Middle East’s Problems,” which appeared in The Atlantic, Nick Danforth (2013) pointed out for instance that: The idea that better borders, drawn with careful attention to the region’s ethnic and religious diversity, would have spared the Middle East a century’s worth of violence is especially provocative … this critique … overlooks how arbitrary every other border in the world is, implies that better borders were possible.

Reshuffling the Middle East: A Historical and Political Perspective

Abstract The Middle East is experiencing one of the darkest periods in its history and a new regional order is still far from being established. Yet, it appears increasingly clear that few matters will affect its developments more than the ongoing regional demographic dynamics. The region’s history and spatial background provide a framework for approaching these epochal shifts and critically examining the ‘ethnic stabilisation’ thesis, which interprets current demographic movements as a kind of normalisation of the region’s ‘original’ demographics. Instead of this ‘medievalization of the Middle East’, many people in the region are keen on ‘getting back into history’ and ‘regaining possession’ of their multifaceted past: a powerful antidote to the geopolitical reductionism so popular nowadays.

Rivolte d’Egitto, una prospettiva di genere

The emerging literature on the socalled Arab Spring has largely focused on the evolution of the uprisings in cities and power centers, as well as the reaction of elites or foreign powers, neglecting events in decentralized contexts and among marginalized groups. This replicates a long-standing trend in the literature which has been powerfully highlighted by Asef Bayat’s research on social non-movements. In order to reach a more diversified and inner understanding of these issues, the article examines the specific case of women in Egypt’s rural areas, shedding light on their conditions and assessing if and how they have reacted and contributed to the dynamics currently unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.

Hajj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī, the “creation” of a leader

Hajj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī – the «Grand Muftī of Jerusalem» – is often portrayed as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in the first part of XX century. Due to his collusion with Nazism, such a position implies that the Palestinian people are, at least in principle, responsible for their own tragic destiny. This study challenges that assumption and sheds light on how and why the Grand Muftī was imposed on the Palestinian people by London. Analyzing the rise to power of Hajj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī and the means granted to him is crucial for understanding the ways through which the British authorities related to the local realities in post-World War I Palestine and to what extent these practices have marked the subsequent development of Palestinian society.

L’importanza degli archivi nel contesto palestinese. Il caso di Abu Dis

The importance of archives in the Palestinian context. The case of Abu Dis. The Palestinian question is the subject of the largest number of books written about a specific region. Despite this, the traditions, habits, and expectations of most of the men and women who, for centuries, have lived in Palestine have been relegated to a secondary role. The sources produced by them and reflecting their lives have sometimes been ignored, at other times underestimated. After a long process, in this most recent historical period wide swathes of Palestinian society have shown that they want to remedy this deficit. They have started to take control of their history and are establishing archives. They are ready to concretize what Ignatieff would have called their «attempt to bring under control losses inflicted by time».