This paper introduces a novel dataset on Egyptian protest activities and state repression responses during the last decade of the rule of Hosni Mubarak. Despite much scholarly interest in the wave of mobilization that characterizes this time period, no comprehensive effort has been undertaken to systematically catalogue protests and security forces' reactions. To address this gap, this dataset draws on thousands of articles from local Egyptian newspapers and NGO reports to provide a rich account of the events of collective action, including protests, strikes, demonstrations and marches, that took place between 2004 and 2011. The events were geocoded and triangulated across multiple sources. This dataset offers two contributions to existing studies of collective action in Egypt. First, it demonstrates the importance of using Arabic-language and local media sources for producing event data, by showing how conventionally used event datasets cover only a fraction of the protest activity that local sources report as taking place in Egypt during those years. Second, the dataset provides more complete coverage of protests that took place during the 18 days of the 2011 uprising, inviting new theoretical explanations for the patterns of these activities.

The 2011-12 Arab Spring operated through democratic diffusion, as waves of popular mobilization against authoritarianism spread across borders. This paper engages the opposite side of the story – how the region’s eight monarchies (Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman) responded to revolutionary diffusion by collaborating with one another, formulating new survival strategies in a sequential process of learning and emulation. Operating in this realm, this paper deepens ongoing work on the intersection between authoritarian rule and the international system by focusing upon the one new monarchical policy shared across the kingdoms beginning in March 2011 – cross-policing. Cross-policing is the practice of each monarchical regime repressing domestic critics of *other* monarchies in a perverse pattern of outsourcing coercion (e.g., the Saudi regime torturing a Saudi citizen criticizing the Jordanian monarchy). Based upon fieldwork in four monarchies and Arabic-language documentation, this paper outlines the origins and development of cross-policing. First, it locates the origins of this policy as an informal strategy pioneered by the Interior Ministries of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the spring of 2011. It also tallies the total number of cases (including individuals and groups) affected by cross-policing through 2016. Second, it traces the spread and formalization of cross-policing through two institutional mechanisms – the transformation of the GCC from a Gulf security alliance into a “club for monarchies,” and frequent meetings between Interior Ministers of the six Gulf kingdoms plus Morocco and Jordan that allowed for convergent anti-terror statutes and new legal codes. Third, it explores the most plausible explanation for why cross-policing emerged as a viable shared strategy between the Arab monarchies – the rise of a pan-royal identity, one that facilitated the ideational circulation of knowledge and was underpinned by communal norms about the superiority of dynastic rule. Finally, it compares cross-policing to other known regional examples of outsourced regional coercion. Those examples number two: 1) Operation Condor, the collective slaughter of US-backed right-wing Latin American regimes against leftist opposition during the 1970s; and 2) shared repression between the SADC (Southern African Development Community) states against liberal opposition in the 1980s.

Building on the work of postcolonial and transnational feminist scholars including Lila Abu-Lughod, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Nicola Pratt, and Edith Szanto, I argue that the US and UK’s cooptation of de-historicized feminist discourses to justify the “war on terror”—and specifically the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—set a pattern now being followed by the Syrian government which is representing the al-Assad regime’s actions in the current conflict in Syria as saving Syrian women from terrorism. These neo-authoritarian “feminist” cultural appeals are being used to construct a Manichean image of the Syrian government’s war against the opposition, and to occlude historical knowledge essential to understanding the complex reality of the conflict, and the actual interests of women caught up in the war. I illustrate this case by means of interpretive textual analysis of online primary data consisting of official interviews, appearances, and state conferences of high profile women officials from the Syrian government. Like how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were the cultural symbols of the US’s and the UK’s war on terror, I show the ways in which Asma al-Assad’s image is constructed as the cultural symbol of Syrian government’s war against the opposition. Beyond this specific case, I claim that what I have called neo-authoritarian feminism is distinct from traditional state feminism, emerging with the war on terror over the past 16 years. The construction of neo-authoritarian feminism, as represented by the Syrian case, is shaped by the interactions between local and international oppressive policies in which both Western “racial states” and Middle Eastern authoritarian states learn from each other what are the most effective repressive measures to employ against whom they perceive as the “other.”

When do actors decide to target journalists during violent conflicts? The taped executions of journalists during the Syrian Civil War generated headlines around the world and led to media claims that this particular civil war is the deadliest in history for reporters. However, there are fundamental issues with this assertion. It has not been empirically tested that the Syrian Civil War is an outlier in targeting journalists and no explanation has been given to why there might be more casualties in Syria compared to other conflicts. In this study, we examine violent conflicts in the Middle East and argue that the dynamics of the conflict matter in determining the rate in which the regime, paramilitaries, or rebel groups target both foreign and local journalists. When it comes to international journalists, the possible threat of outside intervention by another actor will increase the probability that both governments and non-state actors will engage in violence against journalists. The motivation in doing so is to shape the representation of the conflict with the hope of discouraging outside interference. In particular, we argue that groups and governments that articulate rivalrous ideologies with NATO members are most likely to engage in the targeting of foreign journalists. When it comes to local journalists, we argue that they are in greater danger of being targeted the more equal the distribution of capabilities is between the government and violent non-state actors in the conflict. When military capabilities reach parity, journalists are targeted at a higher rate as part of the competition for support between actors. We test our theory with a mixed-method approach by first employing statistical analysis with new cross-national data on the deaths of journalists in the Middle East from 1989 to 2015 in all intrastate conflicts. We then use process tracing to capture the variation in the targeting of journalists in the Algerian Civil War, the Yemeni Civil War of 1994 and the ongoing conflict in Syria. Using both a cross-national approach coupled with within-case analysis we are able to shed light on the calculations made to target the media during wartime.