Despite the tumultuous events that swept the Arab world since the 2011 uprisings, it seems that many of the long-standing categories deployed in constructing an understanding of Middle East politics continue to persist. The euphoric reactions that gave rise to a very short-lived state of criticism of the long-held assumptions about the region’s “exceptionalism” in resisting democratization soon devolved into discussions about “enduring authoritarianism”. Civil war, regional conflict, weak parties, terrorism, and Islamism continue to be the currency dominating the research agenda on politics of the region. As a dataset presented by another paper on this panel shows, the mainstream political science research agenda continues to define the region through a particular prism of “high politics” of regimes and states. The paper investigates why this research agenda survives despite shattering events during the past two decades. It questions the persistence of binaries in the study of the Middle East politics despite the demise of such binaries elsewhere in the discipline. It also shows the convergence between the research agenda of the discipline and the hegemonic discourse of ruling regimes of the region, which the scholarship is predominantly critical of. The papers show that what the region has been experiencing is much more than a failed attempt at ‘democratic transition’ and no less than a historical transformation. Moving beyond the focus of politics as regime-change the paper further reflects on why politics of the region is not only defined through the ballot box, wars, street protests, but also in stadiums, universities, and cafes. The paper will investigate how the public sphere has been reshaped over past five years and how politics of contestation continue to manifest even in the most seemingly subdued environments. In doing so, the paper de-construct salient categories in Middle East politics, moving away from binaries of Islamists versus seculars and military dictatorships versus elected regimes as a way for understanding political developments in the region.

Scholarship on the Middle East has long been described as marginalized within the discipline of political science. This is in part because non-specialists view the region as culturally distinct and, therefore, the usual assumptions about human behavior and political processes are alleged not to apply to Middle Eastern polities and societies. In addition, mainstream political scientists have charged that the types of data and methods that Middle East specialists employ is outdated or anecdotal, although these contentions seem to be on the decline. Where does the field of Middle East politics stand vis-à-vis the discipline of political science? This presentation will draw on a dataset of all MENA-focused published in a selection of the “top” disciplinary journals since roughly 2000, which roughly corresponds to the beginnings of a marked shift in political science data and methods towards greater reliance on experimental and quantitative methods aimed at causal identification, among other trends. The dataset classifies articles based on a variety of attributes, including the topic or subject area (i.e., authoritarianism, Islamism, social mobilization, gender politics, etc.), cases (national, subnational or other geographic or temporal units), methods (i.e., experimental, statistical, case study, interpretive, etc.), author characteristics, and other criteria. To contextualize these descriptive findings about trends in MENA political science scholarship over the past two decades, I will attempt to gather two additional sources of information: First, based on data from the American Political Science Association and various regional studies associations, I will try to compare trends in MENA-focused scholarship with those observed in political science research based on other developing regions such as Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Second, I will attempt to assess how evolving focus areas of research reflect the priorities of scholars and citizens within the region (rather than the priorities of scholars in Western countries), ideally by creating an online survey that asks political scientists within and outside of the region about the issues they deem most pressing for research and by descriptive analyses of relevant public opinion data.

For the past four decades, political economy approaches were used in the study of Middle Eastern states and societies in view of explaining MENA’s dismal developmental record. Political economists dismissed exceptionalist explanations like culture and religion, inherited largely from area studies. They rather stressed institutional and structural factors, firmly based on universalist assumptions, considering MENA as a region in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. On the right, Neo-liberals counted MENA among “the rest” that lacked the right institutions available only in the “West” (De Soto, 2002). MENA was a variant of the neoclassical institutionalist law of private property-based democracy, without which nations would fail (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2009). Abundant oil rents, authoritarianism and a legacy of a bloated public sector impeded the rise of free market development and instead created cronyism, state capture and rampant corrupt that together undermined the positive impacts of globalization (Springborg and Henry, 2010; Chekir and Diwan, 2015). To the left, it was a different kind of universalism. Neoliberalism and globalization served multinationals and/or core states perpetuating patterns of insertion into the world order inimical to development. Once again, the Middle East, because of rent dependency and colonial state legacies, was a variant of a universal pattern of accumulation by dispossession and the upward redistribution of income and wealth, visible in the West and the Rest alike (Harvey, 2007; Glassman, 2006; Hanieh, 2013; Achcar, 2013). This paper is critical of both schools. It argues that both right-and left-wing universalisms have limits. Neither seems to get a balanced dosage of domestic versus global factors in explaining MENA’s failure to develop (with notable exceptions like Roccu, 2013). This paper tackles how domestic institutional, historical and socio-economic factors can be brought in without risking exceptionalism or essentialism. How can MENA’s dismal developmental record be diachronically captured and how can it be assessed in a comparative perspective with other parts of the Global South? After all, many countries could upgrade their position in the global division of labor despite lacking the “right set of institutions”, thought to be quintessential for economic development according to neoclassical institutionalism. In the meantime, globalization-cum-neoliberalism allowed economic development in parts of the Global South (e.g. East and Southeast Asia). And, how can it develop a model that accounts for the variations within MENA instead of a generalized verdict of failed development efforts?