Morten Valbjørn

The New Arab Cold War: rediscovering the Arab dimension of Middle East regional politics

This article provides a conceptual lens for and a thick interpretation of the emergent regional constellation in the Middle East in the first decade of the 21st century. It starts out by challenging two prevalent claims about regional politics in the context of the 2006 Lebanon and 2008–09 Gaza Wars: Firstly, that regional politics is marked by a fundamental break from the ‘old Middle East’ and secondly, that it has become ‘post-Arab’ in the sense that Arab politics has ceased being distinctly Arab. Against this background, the article develops the understanding of a New Arab Cold War which accentuates the still important, but widely neglected Arab dimension in regional politics. By rediscovering the Arab Cold War of the 1950–60s and by drawing attention to the transformation of Arab nationalism and the importance of new trans-Arab media, the New Arab Cold War perspective aims at supplementing rather that supplanting the prominent moderate-radical, sectarian and Realist-Westphalian narratives. By highlighting dimensions of both continuity and change it does moreover provide some critical nuances to the frequent claims about the ‘newness’ of the ‘New Middle East’. In addition to this more Middle East-specific contribution, the article carries lessons for a number of more general debates in International Relations theory concerning the importance of (Arab-Islamist) non-state actors and competing identities in regional politics as well as the interplay between different forms of sovereignty.

Upgrading Post-democratization Studies: Examining a Re-politicized Arab World in a Transition to Somewhere

A few months before Mohammed Bouazizi in late December 2010 set himself aflame in front of the governorate of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, Middle East Critique published a special issue of eight articles examining The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past: Revisting the (first) Era of Post-democratization. As my co-guest editor André Bank and I explained in the opening article, the overall purpose of the special issue was to provide a more self-critical and nuanced understanding of the (post)democratization trend and simultaneously to identify and examine different forms of possible future research strategies within this current in the study of Middle East politics. More specifically, our first aim was to bring attention to how an agreement in principle about the need to get beyond the kind of focus on ‘what ought to be’ prominent among ‘democracy-spotters’ in parts of Middle East scholarship of the 1990s in favor of more attention to ‘what in fact is,’ does not have to imply consensus when it comes to what this more specifically entails for our study of Middle East politics. Thus, we identified a diversity of views within this current along a spectrum going from, at one pole, a—rather large—strand focusing mainly on the dynamics and durability of Arab authoritarianism and all the way to another pole, where people distanced themselves explicitly from both ‘the democratization and authoritarianism paradogma’ in favor of a broader conception of politics which was looking above, below and beyond the level of regime. Besides bringing attention to the diversity of views within the post-democratization trend, a second aim was to situate this trend within the history of Middle East scholarship. Although the prefix is supposed to indicate how post-democratization marks a break from a past—in this case the wishful democracy-spotting of the 1990s—a journey further back in history thus revealed a—mostly unacknowledged—legacy of an earlier era of post-democratization. In view of this, our final aim was to revisit this reservoir of theoretical, methodological and empirical insights first developed or prominently discussed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and use it

Examining the ‘Post’ in Post-Democratization: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past

Following prominent calls for scholars of Middle East politics to enter ‘the era of post-democratization,’ the debate on political rule in the Middle East in recent years has been enriched with its own ‘post’-concept. The prefix ‘post’ indicates something following something else, and usually it is used when the nature of the new condition is contested— e.g., ‘post-modernity.’ One can identify some of these characteristics in the current discussion about ‘post-democratization’ in Middle East scholarship, the theme of this special issue. The overall aim here is to contribute to the debate about Middle Eastern political rule after ‘the end of the transition paradigm.’ This is done not only by providing a more self-critical and nuanced understanding of the post-democratization trend but also through an identification of different forms of possible future research strategies within this trend and

Four dialogues and the funeral of a beautiful relationship: European studies and new regionalism

This article engages in the debate on (the study of) regionalism in providing an overview of the nexus between European Studies (ES) and (New) Regionalism (NR). While the immediate purpose for doing so is to set the stage for the future debate on regional dynamics, this exploration can also be perceived as a case study into (the plurality of forms of) inter/intra-disciplinary dialogue demonstrating the necessity of engaging in ‘dialogues about dialogues’. The article starts by developing a new typology of four different ideal-typical notions of dialogue: hierarchical, reflexive, transformative and eristic models of dialogue. Each of these models is then used to examine different ways of answering questions about why a dialogue between ES/NR should be of interest or not; what ES has to offer; what the coveted impact of such a dialogue is supposed to be; and, finally, which promises and pitfalls such a conversation holds. In this fashion, the stage for future debate addressing regional integration is outlined. It is concluded that these futures look bleak, however, especially because ES and NR no longer appear as each other’s ideal partner-in-dialogue and the relationship is likely to come to an end and hence await its own funeral.

Arab Nationalism(s) in Transformation: From Arab Interstate Societies to an Arab-Islamic World Society

During the summer of 2006, the Palestine conflict once again turned ‘hot’ when intense fighting erupted across the Israeli/Lebanese border. Besides 34 days of violent clashes with Israeli forces, Hizbullah was also engaged in a more symbolic, or ‘cold’, collision with the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian leaders denouncing in public the Shi’i-Arab movement for ‘dragging the region into adventures’. By publicly criticising an Arab actor’s direct — and even rather successful — challenge to Israel in favour of a covert siding with Israel and the United States, these three ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ regimes, as they were termed, were at variance with some of the basic norms in the classic ‘game of Arab politics’. Following US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s (2006) (in)famous depiction of the Summer War 2006 as ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East’ some observers saw these reactions as a sign of how Arab politics had ceased being distinctly Arab. The very notion of a discrete Arab world was dismissed as a mirage without any relevance for a post-Arab twenty-first century. Regional dynamics in this new Middle East would instead either resemble a ‘normal state system’ or be defined by sectarian schisms within Islam as reflected in the clash between Shi’i Hizbullah and three ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ states (cf. Susser, 2006).

The Meeting of the Twain Bridging the Gap between International Relations and Middle East Studies

At the very beginning of his seminal study on Orientalism, Edward W. Said quotes Benjamin Disraeli’s famous statement that ‘the East is a career’ (1978). At first blush one would expect this remark to be a fairly accurate description of International Relations (IR). The Middle East would seem to be an ideal testing ground for IR’s traditional areas of enquiry, both with respect to the ‘classic’ agenda of understanding conflict and its causes, and also with respect to post-Cold War concerns such as national and state identities, supraand sub-national challenges to the states system, or the politics of ethnic and religious identity. For this reason it seems natural also to expect a long history of intense and fertile interdisciplinary communication between IR and Middle East Studies (MES). Indeed, Morgenthau once noticed that Area Studies including MES ‘form a part of that field of knowledge which is called international relations’ (1952: 647).

The 2013 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan: Three Stories and Some General Lessons

On 23 January 2013 elections to the 17th Parliament were held in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It was the first time Jordanians would go to the polls since the beginning of the Arab revolts. Alt...

Three Ways of Revisiting the (post-) Democratization Debate After the Arab Uprisings

This contribution to the roundtable considers the evolution of the debate about democratization and post-democratization before 2011 and examines three different ways of revisiting this debate after the Arab uprisings.

Reflections on self-reflections – On framing the analytical implications of the Arab uprisings for the study of Arab politics

The Arab uprisings have not only impacted large parts of the Arab world. They have also left their mark on scholarship about Arab politics. Following the unexpected events, scholars have been engaged in a self-reflective debate on whether their assumptions and theoretical approaches to Arab politics have proven inadequate and their reasoning flawed, and if some kind of rethink is necessary for how this is supposed to take place. The present article, which belongs in the realms of meta-studies, reflects on these self-reflections. By presenting and evaluating some of the specific positions within this more inward-looking part of the Arab uprisings debate, the article brings attention to how this line of more self-reflective questions can – and has been – addressed within very different kinds of “frames” and how these are associated with very different ways of discussing the analytical applications of the Arab uprisings for Arab politics. More specifically, the article identifies three kinds of framing: (i) a who-has-been-vindicated-and-made-obsolete framing, where the core interest is in picking winners and losers among the last decades’ (post)democratization currents in Middle East studies; (ii) a how-do-we-synthesize-and-upgrade framing, where the ambition is to revise and combine insights from the analytical toolboxes of both authoritarian resilience and democratization; and finally (iii) a how-do-we-get-beyond-the-democratization/authoritarianism-paradogma framing, which perceives the Arab uprisings as an opportunity to engage in a more basic reflection about how (Arab) politics has been and should be debated and whether it is time to make the study of Arab politics into a “genuine science of politics” instead of being reduced mainly to topics of democratization and authoritarian resilience.

Revisiting Theories of Arab Politics in the Aftermath of the Arab Uprisings

‘The following series of short analyses seeks to engage critically with the issue of how to think about Arab politics after the Arab uprisings in the light of past debates on this theme. What are we to make today of previous approaches to the region that emphasized historical sociology, Arabism, regionalism, Islamism, revolution and (post-)democratization? We reflect on (i) how ‘classic debates’ have been impacted, (ii) how important or useful these debates still remain today, and (iii) how we then should proceed.