Featured Research
Ferocious and Fragile: Egypt and the Myth of ‘Authoritarian Stability’ (Gennaro Gervasio & Andrea Teti)
After a brief moment during the 2010-11 Arab Uprisings in which the EU and major Western governments admitted that their support for Middle Eastern autocrats had destabilised regional states and the Mediterranean generally, those same governments quickly returned to defending allegiances with new autocrats in the name of Realpolitik and the pursuit of 'national interests'.
Decolonial Solidarity in Palestine-Israel: Settler Colonialism and Resistance from Within (Teodora Todorova)
Recent years have seen the Israeli state become ever more extreme in its treatment of Palestinians, manifested both in legislation stripping Palestinians of their rights and in the escalating scale and violence of the Israeli occupation. But this hard-line stance has in turn provoked a new spirit of dissent among a growing number of Israeli scholars and civil society activists.
Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Hedi Viterbo)
In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians.
No Bread, No Freedom, No Social Justice: How EU– Egyptian Human Rights Discourse Undermines Democracy (Gennaro Gervasio & Andrea Teti)
Conventional approaches to democratization in the Middle East take for granted the priority of some civil–political rights (e.g., voting) over others (e.g., rights of association or protest, socioeconomic rights). The discursive structure of these approaches has framed both the promotion of democracy by the European Union and regional governments’ counter-conductive reframing against that effort.
Sexuality, nationalism and the other: the Arabic literary canon between Orientalism and the Nahḍa discourse at the fin de siècle (Feras Alkabani)
This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nahḍa discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world.
Revelation in the Qur’an: A Semantic Study of the Roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y (Simon Loynes)
In Revelation in the Qur’an Simon P. Loynes presents a semantic study of the Arabic roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y in order to elucidate the modalities of revelation in the Qur’an. Through an exhaustive analysis of their occurrences in the Qur’an, and with reference to pre-Islamic poetry, Loynes argues that the two roots represent distinct occurrences, with the former concerned with spatial events and the latter with communicative.
Reading Iraqi Women’s Novels in English Translation: Iraqi Women’s Stories (Ruth Abou Rached)
Iraqi women writers have worked for decades to make Iraqi women and Iraqis in general visible and heard in ways that consciously defy any ideology situating oppression as inherent or inevitable, their pathways of translation no exception. By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories’ politics of meaning-making.
Prelude to the revolution. Independent civic activists in Mubarak’s Egypt and the quest for hegemony (Gennaro Gervasio & Andrea Teti)
This article explores whether, in the decade preceding the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s Independent Civic Activists (ICAs) can be considered organic intellectuals in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s well-known definition.
Refugee Entrepreneurial Fund (Malaka Shwaikh)
This project is supported through the University of St Andrews impact fund. It aims to support start-up health-related projects of Syrian and/or Palestinian refugees in ‘the Middle East’ with finance and tailored mentorship to contribute to a more sustainable economy.
The International Thought of Turkish Islamists: History, Civilization and Nation (Katerina Dalacoura)
Dr Katerina Dalacoura was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for three years starting September 2021. The study will focus on texts written by iconic and minor Islamist intellectuals, and the ideologies of religious associations and political organisations in Turkey, to investigate three overlapping themes about ‘the international’: history and historiography; civilisation and culture; nation and state.
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