The paper highlights the challenges of carrying out research on emotion and affect in Middle East studies. It highlights how Arab scholars are using the language of emotion, affect, and affective encounter to capture the experiences of female activists. The analysis is situated within the literature on emotions, affects, and contentious politics. The data for this paper is gathered from semi-structured interviews with scholars, female activists, protestors, and leaders of women's rights groups. The data gathered is analyzed within the prism of critical discourse analysis in an attempt to investigate how past experiences of affective intensity influence future activism. A focus on affect places the experiences of activists squarely in our analysis. It is apt to capture the complexity of the topic while retaining the authenticity of the subject--and I would also argue the researcher. It allows researchers to reclaim the voices of female activists in explaining the challenges and opportunities that developed during and following the uprising and how these developments influenced and shaped their experience, movement, and mobilization.

Numerous common denominators amongst the oil-rich Arab countries - markedly surpassed by the Khaleeji identity - assisted in forming the coalition of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). These states primarily located within the Arabian Peninsula share the same cultural traits, tribal structures, and loyalties, which made the formation of such a coalition an effortless transition into an agreement of symbiotic visions for the future of the region. Presently, the GCC has been undergoing a myriad of inner conflicts and power struggles that has come as a shock to many outsiders, as the GCC states began to diverge the future goals for their countries – due to fundamental changes in self-definition and differing viewpoints of the possible threats of the “other”. The sudden departure of the State of Qatar from the GCC club revealed the weaknesses of the communitarian belief and value system of the Gulf countries and undermined the unique Khaleeji identity as a strong identity marker that would always unite the region’s people against a common threat. With the reemergence of Iran as a regional player and the spread of Shiite identity and politics via Islamist factions in the region; communitarian ideas and its weaknesses are highlighting the harsh reality of the minority Shi’ite residents in the GCC, and how undermining them has led to exacerbation of the breakdown of the GCC - as both a security community and a regional identity. This article analyses why the common Khaleeji identity and Khaleeji dialect was not sufficient in stopping the alienation of Qatar as well as the proxy war in Yemen; by providing a brief historical analysis of the history of Gulf identity in line with that of its influential neighbors Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Moreover, this article aims to examine why the GCC has failed to strengthen its communitarian structure, preferring to invest in their own individual strength and bilateral alliances with other states in the region and beyond. This paper will conclude with a list of possibilities and/or scenarios where the Khaleeji identity may once again help bridge the ideological differences in favor of communitarian cohesion in times of crisis

Few works on the Middle East and North African region have begun to understand how mass cultural and subcultural forms (such as, TV, film, graffiti, cartoons, music, dance) function in the process of social and political change. This paper will fill this gap by interrogating the theories of social and political change in cultural theory, integrating the cultural studies, and contributing to the prevailing and emerging theoretical trends in Middle Eastern politics. By the end of 2010, the world’s eyes were on the various squares in Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, as millions of people poured into the city centres and streets. The urgent social, cultural, political and economic realities which have unsettled the hegemonic structures of state formations and processes of subjectivation have also strongly revealed how political identity is and always has been unstable and mutable. This methodological approach underlines the commitment to theorizing the “transcultural” as a new phase of Arab citizen engagement that stresses the need for sharing information, ignoring borders, opposing censorship, and adopting common strategies in the fight for social justice. The concept of “transcultural identity” stands at the interface of these large-scale political transformations and their sociocultural articulation. It indexes the multiple channels through which an Egyptian public now understands and imagines autonomy, agency, and self-representation. The point, it should be stressed, is not to suggest that a transcultural identity now transcends all others. To the contrary, the concept is meant to highlight how cultural identity and political consciousness can no longer be assumed; we must, instead, investigate how they are negotiated along various intersecting axes—postcolonial (Arab nationalist, Islamist, state-nationalist), ethno-religious (sectarian and tribal), and class-based, to name just a few. In so doing the paper proposes new vocabulary for scholars in the field of Middle Eastern politics to capture these competing identities, and highlights their own positionality within them.

In the aftermath of the Arab spring, a large body of literature on the Arab spring, its roots and its consequences appeared in the two fields of mainstream Political Science and Middle East studies. However, rarely did this vast body of literature engage with the writings of native academics and commentators who were writing compelling accounts and analysis of what's happening in their countries, mostly in Arabic. In this paper, I address the consequences of this omission on and its consequences on the scholarly production on the Arab spring. In particular, I analyze the various forms of this omission, including but not limited to selective translation, treating Arab academics as native informants, and reproducing narratives about the Arab democratic deficit and the cultural factors behind despotism). This paper argues that the politics of positionality, language, and the power dynamics separating native academics from those working in the West serve to marginalize certain native voices, while highlighting others. It further argues that western academia is not immune to many of the biases that exist in covering the region in the mainstream media. Through an analysis of selected texts written by Arab scholars and how they received ( or not in Western academia), this paper aims to question some of the main assumptions informing producing scholarly knowledge on the Arab uprisings, and suggest an agenda for future research that takes into consideration the unequal structure of knowledge production in western academia.