The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic - at the interlocking levels of politics, economy, and society - have been different across regions, states, and societies. In the case of the Middle East and North Africa, which was already in the throes of intense tumult following the onset of the 2011 Arab Spring, COVID's blows have on the one hand followed the trajectory of some global patterns, while at the same time playing out in regionally specific ways. Based on empirical country-level analysis, this volume brings together an international team of contributors seeking to untangle how COVID-19 unfolds across the MENA. The analyses are framed through a contextual adaptation of Ulrich Beck's famous concept of "risk society" that pinpointed the negative consequences of modernity and its unbridled capitalism. The book traces how this has come home in full force in the COVID-19 pandemic. The editors, Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, use the term "Arab risk society". They highlight short-term and long-term repercussions across the MENA. These include socio-economic inequality, a revitalized state of authoritarianism challenged by relentless democratic struggles. But the analyses are attuned to problem-solving research. The "ethnographies of the pandemic" included in this book investigate transformations and coping mechanisms within each country case study. They provide an ethically-informed research praxis that can respond to the manifold crises crashing down upon MENA polities and societies

Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East. It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write-speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity. Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).

Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East. It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write-speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity. Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).

Sudden change in North Africa manifested through popular protests followed by the end of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya revitalised the scholarly concern with democracy in the region. Democratisation and democracy received fresh attention in the 'Arab Spring'. Arab citizens displayed their grasp and possession of 'democratic knowledge' in a bottom-up groundswell of activism against the wielding of power by authoritarian regimes. In this book, the investigation into democratic knowledge revolves around the idea that good government must be in the first instance rooted in a local system of knowledge. However, no privileging of the 'local' is offered here at the expense of the 'democratic'. Each chapter illustrates the context-specific experiences which provide political actors with the wherewithal in actively learning democracy. The countries examined with reference to a socially constructed democratic knowledge include Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Critical focus on local agency in North Africa during the 'Arab Spring' enables a shift from democratisation as an ideology to a 'democratic learning turn'. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.

The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010 heralded the arrival of the 'Arab Spring,' a startling, yet not unprecedented, era of profound social and political upheaval. The meme of the Arab Spring is characterised by bottom-up change, or the lack thereof, and its effects are still unfurling today. The Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring seeks to provide a departure point for ongoing discussion of a fluid phenomenon on a plethora of topics, including: Contexts and contests of democratisation The sweep of the Arab Spring Egypt Women and the Arab Spring Agents of change and the technology of protest Impact of the Arab Spring in the wider Middle East and further afield Collating a wide array of viewpoints, specialisms, biases, and degrees of proximity and distance from events that shook the Arab world to its core, the Handbook is written with the reader in mind, to provide students, practitioners, diplomats, policy-makers and lay readers with contextualization and knowledge, and to set the stage for further discussion of the Arab Spring.

This book is concerned with EU democracy promotion inside Tunisia, the first Arab signatory of an Association Agreement with the EU. Focusing on the content, context, mechanisms, and outcomes of democratization via association, the authors examine whether Tunisia's specific mode of democratization works in tandem with EU democracy promotion objectives, and the extent to which both adapt association in a way that neither sabotages EU democracy promotion nor undermines Tunisia's specificity. Drawing on Arabic, English and French sources, the book deploys a variety of methods and disciplinary approaches - discourse analysis, interviews, democratization theory, foreign policy analysis, security studies, political history, nationalism and identity - and takes an interpretivist perspective, conceiving of political processes as fluid and tentative. The first comprehensive study of the effects of the Union's Mediterranean democracy promotion strategy on a single recipient state, this book will be relevant to students of Middle East politics, European foreign policy, Euro-Mediterranean studies, democratization theory, and Euro-Arab relations, this book will also be of great interest to researchers, academics and policy-makers.

This book is concerned with EU democracy promotion inside Tunisia, the first Arab signatory of an Association Agreement with the EU. Focusing on the content, context, mechanisms, and outcomes of democratization via association, the authors examine whether Tunisia's specific mode of democratization works in tandem with EU democracy promotion objectives, and the extent to which both adapt association in a way that neither sabotages EU democracy promotion nor undermines Tunisia's specificity.

Drawing on Arabic, English and French sources, the book deploys a variety of methods and disciplinary approaches - discourse analysis, interviews, democratization theory, foreign policy analysis, security studies, political history, nationalism and identity - and takes an interpretivist perspective, conceiving of political processes as fluid and tentative. The first comprehensive study of the effects of the Union's Mediterranean democracy promotion strategy on a single recipient state, this book will be relevant to students of Middle East politics, European foreign policy, Euro-Mediterranean studies, democratization theory, and Euro-Arab relations, this book will also be of great interest to researchers, academics and policy-makers.

The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010 heralded the arrival of the Arab Spring, a startling, yet not unprecedented, era of profound social and political upheaval.

The meme of the Arab Spring is characterised by bottom-up change, or the lack thereof, and it's effects are still unfurling today. "The Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring "seeks to provide a departure point for ongoing discussion of a fluid phenomenon on a plethora of topics, including:

• Contexts and contests of democratisation
• The sweep of the Arab Spring
• Egypt
• Women and the Arab Spring
• Agents of change and the technology of protest
• Impact of the Arab Spring in the wider Middle East and further afield

Collating a wide array of viewpoints, specialisms, biases, and degrees of proximity and distance from events that shook the Arab world to its core, the "Handbook "is written with the reader in mind, to provide students, practitioners, diplomats, policy-makers and lay readers with contextualization and knowledge, and to set the stage for further discussion of the Arab Spring."

Popular uprisings and revolts across the Arab Middle East have often resulted in a democratic faragh or void in power. How society seeks to fill that void, regardless of whether the regime falls or survives, is the common trajectory followed by the seven empirical case studies published here for the first time. This edited volume seeks to unpack the state of the democratic void in three interrelated fields: democracy, legitimacy and social relations. In doing so, the conventional treatment of democratization as a linear, formal, systemic and systematic process is challenged and the power politics of democratic transition reassessed. Through a close examination of case studies focusing on Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, this collection introduces the reader to indigenous narratives on how power is wrested and negotiated from the bottom up. It will be of interest to those seeking a fresh perspective on democratization models as well as those seeking to understand the reshaping of the Arab Middle East in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

Rethinking Arab Democratization unpacks and historicizes the rise of Arab electoralism, narrating the story of stalled democratic transition in the Arab Middle East. It provides a balance sheet of the state of Arab democratization from the mid-1970s up to 2008. In seeking to answer the question of how Arab countries democratize and whether they are democratizing at all, the book pays attention to specificity, highlighting the peculiarities of democratic transitions in the Arab Middle East. To this end, it situates the discussion of such transitions firmly within their local contexts, but without losing sight of the global picture, namely, the US drive to control and democratize' the Arab World. Rethinking Arab Democratization rejects exceptionalism', foundationalism', and Orientalism', by showing that the Arab World is not immured from the global trend towards political liberalization. But by identifying new trends in Arab democratic transitions, highlighting their peculiarities and drawing on Arab neglected discourses and voices, it pinpoints the contingency of some of the arguments underlying Western theories of democratic transition when applied to the Arab setting.
Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Official Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University.

Sudden change in North Africa manifested through popular protests followed by the end of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya revitalised the scholarly concern with democracy in the region. Democratisation and democracy received fresh attention in the 'Arab Spring'. Arab citizens displayed their grasp and possession of 'democratic knowledge' in a bottom-up groundswell of activism against the wielding of power by authoritarian regimes. In this book, the investigation into democratic knowledge revolves around the idea that good government must be in the first instance rooted in a local system of knowledge. However, no privileging of the 'local' is offered here at the expense of the 'democratic'. Each chapter illustrates the context-specific experiences which provide political actors with the wherewithal in actively learning democracy. The countries examined with reference to a socially constructed democratic knowledge include Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Critical focus on local agency in North Africa during the 'Arab Spring' enables a shift from democratisation as an ideology to a 'democratic learning turn'. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.

How to be a "democrat" and a "Muslim" at the same time is the subject of ongoing contests. This book maps out the variety of voices contesting "Islam" and "democracy" in the Arab world, insisting that neither category can be taken as unitary or fixed.

In the Arab Middle East, the contest is over "which," "whose," and "how much" democracy takes place within an existing contest over "which," "whose," and "how much" Islam must be given pre-eminence in the political and cultural sphere. There is a "Democracy" and there are "democracies." There is an "Islam" and there are "islams."

Larbi Sadiki deploys the conceptual tools of contemporary Western political philosophy and theory to articulate and defend some provocative theses. The book challenges Eurocentric conceptions of democracy that all-too-frequently display a lack of concern for specificity and context; analyzes and interrogates Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses on democracy; and considers some of the justifications for democracy in the global arena, giving space for self-representation by women and Islamists, among others. Using interviews with Muslims from every social and economic stratum, the book shows how Arabs themselves understand, imagine, and view democracy.

Popular uprisings and revolts across the Arab Middle East have often resulted in a democratic faragh or void in power. How society seeks to fill that void, regardless of whether the regime falls or survives, is the common trajectory followed by the seven empirical case studies published here for the first time. This edited volume seeks to unpack the state of the democratic void in three interrelated fields: democracy, legitimacy and social relations. In doing so, the conventional treatment of democratization as a linear, formal, systemic and systematic process is challenged and the power politics of democratic transition reassessed. Through a close examination of case studies focusing on Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, this collection introduces the reader to indigenous narratives on how power is wrested and negotiated from the bottom up. It will be of interest to those seeking a fresh perspective on democratization models as well as those seeking to understand the reshaping of the Arab Middle East in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

This book offers a novel and interdisciplinary exploration of revolution as situated protest in Tunisia. Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh present extensive local evidence to demonstrate that popular resistance has been a mainstay of modern Tunisia before, during, and after colonialism. Protest makes peoplehood, and peoplehood makes protest: neither is self-contained. The book explores the rich history and diversity of insurrectionary politics in Tunisia from the onset of protests in the 1960s up to the 2011 Arab Spring revolution and beyond, exploring bottom-up activism (hirak) and revolution (thawrah). The six protestscapes presented in the volume (unions, student activists, the phosphate uprising, the 2010-11 revolution, Kamour, and football ultras) offer a novel way of examining partial 'moving snapshots' that are crucial to understanding revolution. They counter the prevailing narrative of revolution as leaderless, a spontaneous surprise with no historical pedigree or inherited learning, and depict instead an active citizenry whose collective memories are stamped by trials of anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial rebellion.

Rethinking Arab Democratization unpacks and historicizes the rise of Arab electoralism, narrating the story of stalled democratic transition in the Arab Middle East. It provides a balance sheet of the state of Arab democratization from the mid-1970s up to 2008. In seeking to answer the question of how Arab countries democratize and whether they are democratizing at all, the book pays attention to specificity, highlighting the peculiarities of democratic transitions in the Arab Middle East. To this end, it situates the discussion of such transitions firmly within their local contexts, but without losing sight of the global picture, namely, the US drive to control and democratize' the Arab World. Rethinking Arab Democratization rejects exceptionalism', foundationalism', and Orientalism', by showing that the Arab World is not immured from the global trend towards political liberalization. But by identifying new trends in Arab democratic transitions, highlighting their peculiarities and drawing on Arab neglected discourses and voices, it pinpoints the contingency of some of the arguments underlying Western theories of democratic transition when applied to the Arab setting.
Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Official Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University.