The dramatic transformations that occurred in Tunisia and Egypt in the winter of 2010-2011 have caused an immense surprise among Western publics, including in the academic communities. The protests for human dignity and against authoritarianism belied most of the predictions, and paradigms through which political change in the Middle East and North Africa was analyzed. The claims that were made during the protests also challenged traditional binaries (between secularism and Islamism, male and female, younger and older generations). As a response to these unexpected events, social scientists and Middle East experts resorted to different analytical strategies. This paper will examine Western scholarly attempts at making sense of the “Arab spring” with a particular attention to the following three points. -The labeling battle. As soon as the protests began, a debate emerged among experts and analysts, in order to know how to best label the events. Different competing labels were proposed: spring, revolts, revolution, uprisings, social movements etc. To what extent does this definitional battle express a deeper disagreement about the meaning, legitimacy and prospect of the current Arab political transformations? -The search for models. An essential corollary of this definitional endeavor was the debate about the models and paradigms that would best permit the understanding and explanation of the unexpected Arab changes. A battle for models soon erupted whereby the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were compared to the French revolution, the Prague Spring, the Eastern European revolutions, the “third wave” of democratization etc. How did each national intellectual tradition influence the understanding of Arab transformations, and to what extent do these interpretations reveal an attempt at mastering the unknown –reinterpreted mostly in terms of threat/menace- rather than at understanding? -The formation of a new, soft orientalism. In an article published in September 2011 (Al Ahram), Mona Abaza, a sociologist from the American University of Cairo (“Academic Tourists Sightseeing the Arab Spring”) provocatively denounced the problematic “ internal division of labor” that is taking place among the academic community. “Local” scholars are mainly “service providers” for Western scholars who keep a monopoly over the production of theories and models and remain the sole legitimate “knowing subjects”. This provocative article has indeed emphasized an important and under-studied issue regarding the conditions of formation of knowledge about the Arab revolutions. To what extent have the political changes permitted a transformation of the conditions of production of knowledge about the region?

Unlike its European ancestors, the United States was never involved in the direct colonization of Northwest African territory. Nonetheless, the United States has played an important role in the fate of the Maghrib and Sahara-Sahel. Most accounts of US energy interests in the region narrate a story dominated by Libya — a story of cooperation, conflict, and, now, revolution and intervention. The US-Libyan enmity has been well documented and subject to much public and political debate. Less well know is the history of US energy interests in the Algerian Sahara. Today Algeria is among the top ten energy suppliers to the United States yet the post-colonial trajectory of Algiers-Washington relations has been one marked by seemingly profound ideological difference. When one compares this history to that of Algeria’s western neighbor, Morocco, and its eastern neighbor, Tunisia, countries with very little hydrocarbon reserves of their own, the contrast is quite striking. The purpose here is, first, to bring back into the study of US relations in the Maghrib the issue of hydrocarbon locations and allocations, paying close attention to the different tactics deployed in Washington’s pursuit energy security, regional stability, and the promotion of humanitarian norms. At the centre of the analysis here will be the crises of civil violence in Algeria (1997-98) and Libya (2011), which prompted two very different reactions. The second purpose is to offer an account of the powers of hydrocarbons and US hegemony in the Maghrib without necessarily imbuing either with a logic and coherence they do not have.

"The only thing I know certain about him is that he's evil." So said President George W. Bush (of Osama bin Laden) in a November 2001 press conference. Though one might be tempted to dismiss this as merely the rhetorical bravado of a public figure in the aftermath of attack, this proclamation encapsulates a central presupposition about the role of expertise in the American "global war on terror" that emerged after the attacks of 9/11/2001. While studies have often focused upon the role of Orientalism in depictions of the Middle East, and particularly in the expert knowledges mobilized by "Western" states as they intervene in the region, the war on terror was not, for the most part, characterized by the mobilization of Orientalist knowledge, but by a disavowal of the need for expert knowledge at all (and particularly expert knowledge of the localized or cultural variety). Although there have been projects that aim to incorporate "cultural" knowledge into the war on terror (perhaps most notably via the "Human Terrain Systems" program), these have been relatively subordinated, despite the sometimes outsize levels of attention they have been given in the media. This paper examines the records of government-funded research on terrorism between 2001 and 2010, via the NTIS (National Technical Information Service) database, to show that the production of expert knowledge on "terrorism" after 9/11 was dominated not by "cultural" analysis, but by techniques such as network analysis, which eclipsed the need to actually "know" individual terrorists or their social worlds. This paper then draws on historical research into the construction of the problem of "terrorism" and the field of "terrorism expertise" in the U.S. since 1972 to show how it was that the problem it came to be enacted in such a way that not only was contextualized social, historical, and cultural "local knowledge" not necessary to "understand" and act upon the problem. Not only did local knowledge come to be seen as unnecessary for managing the problem, it could even be seen as detrimental to the production of expertise. Those who got too close to the problem, in a context where explanation can to be seen as justification, were liable to being discredited by their very knowledge.

This paper explores the question of the politics of knowledge production and possibilities for developing postcolonial forms of scholarship about the international relations of the Middle East. Responding to Barkawi and Laffey’s “The postcolonial moment in security studies,” I suggest that perhaps the next turn in security studies and international relations scholarship should be led by scholars situated in the postcolonial states, especially those exposed to the violence of colonial modernity and the experiences of insecurity that entails. To illustrate these possibilities I highlight the ongoing work of what I suggest could be referred to the as the ‘Beirut School’ of security studies. This work has been produced by scholars of diverse national and disciplinary backgrounds working in Beirut and/or writing about the position of Lebanon in regional and global geopolitics. The critical nature of this work is shaped in part by its familiarity with a context that has suffered from political violence and war often due to Lebanon’s vulnerable position in regional politics. Challenging the view that Lebanon is simply a weak state, lacking sovereignty and thus a battleground for non-state terrorist movements and external actors, this scholarship transcends the statist limitations of security studies and international relations theory by exploring highlighting societal understandings of insecurity, the role of non-state actors as agents of security (as well as insecurity), constructions of hybrid-sovereignty. In addressing these issues, I argue that such knowledge production efforts are essential for global studies as they engage rival perspectives and interests (often sources of mutual insecurity) that rarely gain mutual recognition as legitimate actors in international politics and contribute to efforts to imagine a more pluralist global order.

Since its onset, the Arab Spring was dubbed, the twitter revolution, the youth revolution and the facebook revolution. What these names reflected is the image of the middle/upper class educated youth who are fluent in English and tech savvy. There has been furious debate over these individuals and their role in the revolutions. Most were based on the agency or lack of it of the people involved in the revolutions, the participation of different groups in the revolts and the impossibility to talk about youth as one group regardless of class and gender. However, up until now the literature lacked an analysis of a phenomenon that was a normal result of this naming, and specifically the creation of “young middle class English-speaking youth” who acted and are still acting as gatekeepers of these revolts in the west and the spokespersons of the revolutions. The paper will try to shed light on this phenomenon, first,by tracing the creation of these subjects to shed lights on the interests of western media/researchers/leftists behind this phenomenon, and Second, the paper will try to situate this phenomenon in the broader question of knowledge production about the Arab region.