Featured Research

As Middle East-focused researchers we often feel that our topics of interest, methods, and the theories we draw on are poorly received in ‘mainstream’ Political Science and International Relations. Pamela Abbott and I found striking empirical evidence for this. Our article maps and analyses publication patterns of Middle East Studies-related scholarship in 13 ‘top’ Political Science & IR journals, providing a more precise analysis of the marginality of ‘regional’ scholarship in Political Science. This marginalisation on is even starker at three different levels: 1. the use of qualitative evidence, 2. the use of qualitative methods and 3. the use of non-positivist or Marxian theoretical frameworks, all of which are rare-to-non-existent. We hope the article will be of use to researchers but also in classrooms, e.g. analysing the politics of knowledge production in Social Science.

In this article, we examine the use of war metaphors in Jordanian official discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, through an analysis of videos of public statements and media releases made by Jordanian government officials at press conferences and interviews with local media outlets which were disseminated through social media.

This article investigates the socio-linguistic and pragmatic functions of Jordanian political humour after the Arab Spring revolutions from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and the carnivalesque (folk humour). The analysis undertaken here of Jordanian political humour reveals a peculiar use of carnivalesque political humour via the use of humour as a socio-linguistic and pragmatic device that allows the ridicule of the government but not of the monarch.

This article relies on the life story narratives of 48 young members of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in identifying the different reasons behind their political disengagement in the aftermath of the 2013 military coup. Unlike the social Movement Theory scholarly writings addressing Islamists’ political disengagement within a limited scope of analysis that focuses on members leaving their groups rather than politics, this study presents a multi-layered approach that examines the interplay between youth’s personal experiences, the repressive macro political conditions, and the organizational decay in shaping young Muslim Brothers’ positions towards political activism.

On any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi - the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated - and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability.