Arab Studies (ARST)

This course is designed for Master of Arts in Arab Studies (MAAS) students who seek to enhance their professional development and career readiness in organizations focused on Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) both in the United States and within the region. The course will feature guest speakers, including MAAS alumni working across various sectors, who will share insights and experiences relevant to the field. Additionally, class sessions will include peer-to-peer and instructor-led discussions on key professional topics such as workplace etiquette, resume and cover letter preparation, and effective networking strategies, all aimed at improving post-graduation employment outcomes.

This course is designed to prepare MAAS students for both the written and oral Arabic proficiency exams, while also developing the broader skills needed for success beyond testing. Through targeted practice, guided feedback, and interactive activities, students will build the language proficiency, strategies, and confidence necessary to perform well in the exams. At the same time, the course emphasizes long-term growth, ensuring that students strengthen their overall communicative abilities in Arabic for academic, professional, and real-world contexts.

This course is designed to prepare MAAS students for both the written and oral Arabic proficiency exams, while also developing the broader skills needed for success beyond testing. Through targeted practice, guided feedback, and interactive activities, students will build the language proficiency, strategies, and confidence necessary to perform well in the exams. At the same time, the course emphasizes long-term growth, ensuring that students strengthen their overall communicative abilities in Arabic for academic, professional, and real-world contexts

This course is designed to enhance students' Arabic language skills—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—while exploring contemporary Syrian literature across various genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. Through the analysis and discussion of selected texts, students will develop their proficiency in Arabic while gaining insight into the historical and cultural context of Syrian literary traditions. Students will engage in structured activities to practice their language skills, including weekly reflection assignments that encourage critical thinking and language development, as well as class discussions to strengthen their speaking and listening abilities. The course will culminate in a presentation where students will demonstrate their improved proficiency by analyzing an aspect of modern Syrian literature.

This course will focus on developing writing skills and will help students expand their vocabulary and perfect their grammar.

**Graduate students wanting to take this course for graduate credit MUST register in ARST 5221. This course aims to strengthen students’ Arabic reading, listening, and speaking skills while providing them with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to study Arabic literary texts produced by intellectual prisoners. Students will explore the motives, themes, and stylistic features of prison writing, as well as its mutual relationship with the structures of Arab authoritarian regimes, society, and culture. Prison literature encompasses works written by prisoners either during their incarceration or after their release. It also includes works by authors who were never imprisoned themselves but who drew inspiration from the accounts of others, or who imagined such experiences in order to contribute to this literary tradition. This body of literature spans poetry, novels, plays, short stories, biographies, and memoirs, and serves as a powerful lens through which to examine both the individual experience of confinement and the broader dynamics of repression, resistance, and cultural expression in the Arab world.

This course is for Intermediate and Advanced-level Arabic students who are interested in learning Levantine dialects - covering Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.

This course offers an exploration of Arab feminism as depicted in literature, including novels and short stories. It is structured in two parts: the first part introduces students to the vocabulary and concepts of Arab feminism through various media; the second part involves an in-depth analysis of representative works of Arab feminist literature. This course is conducted entirely in Arabic and requires ACTFL Advanced Low-Mid Arabic proficiency. Course Objectives: Enhance students' proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and presenting in Arabic. Develop an understanding of feminist issues and themes in Arab literature. Foster an inclusive learning environment respecting all backgrounds and perspectives.

Through the study of Arabic novels, this course aims to teach students how to analyze literary works with political content and ideas, and helps them to learn how writers express their political views and represent the currents of political movements in their novels. This course is taught in Arabic.

This specialized course offers an intensive and tailored Arabic language course designed specifically for professionals and volunteers preparing to work in various NGOs within the Arab world. The course integrates standard Arabic language skills with a focus on specialized terminologies and context-specific communication needs in the fields of humanitarian aid, refugee support, and women’s rights. By immersing students in real-life scenarios through role-plays, the course ensures participants are equipped with the language proficiency and cultural sensitivity required to effectively communicate and make a positive impact in their respective fields.

This course is for students who have passed proficiency in Arabic, who would like to strengthen their ability to read, write and converse in topics such as contemporary politics, development, refugees and emergencies, human rights and other related fields.

This 7-week course focuses on the evolution of United States foreign policy in the Persian Gulf from the end of World War II to the present and why this region remains critically important to US national security interests. We will examine the issues and challenges that buffeted this region, among others – the Cold War, the geopolitics of oil and gas, the rise of Iran under the Mullahs, regional rivalries and challenges to the Gulf nation-states, and counterterrorism cooperation in the 21st century.

The US presence in the Persian Gulf – diplomatically, militarily, and commercially – expanded exponentially in the wake of the Iranian revolution in 1979. Our naval presence increased with the decision in 1987 to re-flag Kuwaiti oil tankers under the American flag. And only two years after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s, Saddam Hussain’s march into Kuwait prompted the United States to marshal an international coalition in 1990-1991 to liberate Kuwait and repel his forces near the border of Saudi Arabia. A decade later, a second war with Iraq led to another significant deployment of American military strength into the Gulf. With the rise of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups that have attacked the United States, our allies in Europe and the Middle East, the US military footprint has expanded and our intelligence cooperation with the GCC countries has grown dramatically. The negotiations of the P5+1 with Iran during the Obama Administration resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), a nuclear deal that is now being reconsidered by President Trump. The study of this period of history provides a foundation for understanding future US policy determinations in the Gulf.

This course will offer an introduction to the complex historical and contemporary relationship between the United States and the Middle East by examining the U.S. involvement in the region from the nineteenth century, with the main focus on the period of the post-Second World War to the present day. It will shed light on the depth of the US political, economic, and cultural involvement in the region, critically survey the U.S. formulation of its strategic interests in the region, assess the ideological and domestic variables (e.g., media, lobby, NGOs, private corporates, military presence …), among others, in shaping and pursuing these interests in the Middle East. We will consider long-term relations in the American approach to the region, and diverse interpretations of these relations. However, the U.S. role in the Middle East will be also examined from the lens of the region’s own perspective whether constructive or harmful since its current and ongoing deep involvement has become decisive in influencing regional dynamics. In other words, this course aims to provide some understanding of the most volatile region in the world by highlighting the role played by the most powerful, yet challenged actor in the Middle East.

This course is designed to provide students with the basic structure of Iraq’s political and socio-economic history from World War I to the present day through readings drawn from some of the most important books and articles in English. The class will examine the main political parties of that period (the Iraqi Communist Party and the Ba‘th Party); the various sectarian and tribal communities of Iraq and their interaction with the elites. The course is built on a chronological base and will end by considering the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its implications, and then appraise the state of Iraq sixteen years after the invasion from different points of view.

The course provides an introduction to the political economy of the Arab countries in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, often referred to as Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It emphasizes the structural characteristics of their economic development in light of colonial legacy and post-independence developmentalist policies while examining their human and natural resource endowments, their institutional factors, social classes, labor markets and the effects of international actors and their penetration of the region. The course covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to issues associated with paradigms of development, underdevelopment and de-development, colonial imperial capitalism, racial capitalism, economy of independent state-led growth, political economy of oil and resource extraction, state-society relations in light of unruly neoliberalism, political economy of globalization and global finance capitalism, political economy of the securocratic state and accumulation by repression, political economy of the 2010-11 Arab uprising, political economy of gender and migration, inequality and struggle for food sovereignty and against land grabbing, among other themes. This course moves away from dominant discourse that seeks to provide a mainstream sanitized version of the political economy of WANA narrowly and biasedly centered on rentierism, economic diversification, monetarism, econometric, and macroeconomic indicators, among other conventional notions that not only have characterized most of the academic curriculum but most importantly failed to explain the widespread poverty, deterioration of standards of living, rising consumer prices and lack of employment opportunities, among other issues. Instead, this course is deeply grounded in a complex approach of a critical political economy perspective of WANA seeking to pay more attention to the structures of global capitalism and its role in the uneven distribution of wealth, its articulation and deployment across the region in the pre and post-colonial era while emphasizing its congruent connections to class, identity, capital and markets in their gendered, racialized, and socially hierarchized forms in order to better capture the region’s socio-political dynamics and challenges that it is facing. It provides a window into economics as a field and how it has interacted with the development of capitalism as a social system and its inherent tendency to generate exploitation, hierarchy subordination, racialization and inequality. By examining the historical roots of capitalism and looking at how they shape societies today, the course seeks to challenge myths surrounding capitalism as the main, dominant and unavoidable form of human society across the WANA region. Through an interdisciplinary approach—drawing from economics, history, anthropology, political science, sociology, geography ...— this course aims at bridging economic theory, history, and real-world policy while providing the epistemic tools to envision and design alternative futures to literally rethink capitalism and its implications for the WANA region. The course is grounded in comprehensive theoretical perspectives and empirical debates. It relies on scholarships accessible to undergraduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and who are interested in political economy and development of the WANAregion.

The focus of this lab class will be on different types of development (e.g., community-based development, state-driven, NGOs, international bodies, etc.), and how development functions as solutions to situations of emergency crises and protracted displacement. Students will acquire theoretical background in both displacement and development as well as specific knowledge of development and displacement in the Arab world. The disciplinary focus is anthropological, addressing issues related to economics, politics, society, heritage, and law.

This course has an optional 1-credit travel component (ARST 368). During spring break, we will travel to Jordan to learn about community-based development projects and the impact of displacement on communities. Students will then develop a final project related to community-based development in the West Bank, or prepare a proposal for such a project in Iraq or Syria or for Syrian refugees. No specific background is required, although some knowledge of the region and Arabic is helpful. A willingness to travel in difficult conditions and follow specific instructions is essential for the travel component.

-Instructor Approval Required Prior to Registration. Application and interview information can be found here: https://myguabroad.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10316 The application will be used to determine registration for ARST 367 (3 credit semester-long course), as well as as ARST 368 (1 credit optional spring break course). -Application deadline: November 13, 2018. Interviews will be scheduled for the week of Nov. 26-30, 2018. (All dates are subject to change) -Students may apply for and participate in ARST 367 (3 credit course) without participating in ARST 368 (optional 1 credit spring break travel to Jordan). However, students may not apply for and participate in ARST 368 (1cr) without being enrolled in ARST 367 (3cr) as well. -You must be able to travel with the class during all of spring break if taking ARST 368. -This course is not open to Freshmen. - All students will be registered for both classes by the Global Experience Program Director. Students are encouraged to speak with their advising dean prior to registration.

ARST 368 is an optional opportunity to participate in international fieldwork in the West Bank during spring break. Enrollment in the SFS Centennial Lab ARST 367: Development and Displacement is mandatory and instructor approval is required.

Instructor approval can be obtained through an application, which is available here: https://georgetown-sa.terradotta.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10316

Political Repression and Dissent in the Modern Middle East is a comparative politics course that examines the dynamics of political repression and dissent across the region. Students will be introduced to the concepts of political repression and dissent and some of the key questions in this sub-literature including; What drives dissent? Why do states repress? What is the relationship between regime types and repression? The course provides a survey of repression and dissent dynamics in various countries throughout the region guided by classic and contemporary literature.

In this course we will be pursuing two parallel and complementary tracks. The first is a historical survey of episodes of repression and dissent in the Middle East guided by John Chalcraft’s Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East. This is a core text and required reading. Assigned sections will be part of most class sessions. The second track will be a thematic and theoretic survey of the study of political repression.

This course explores the history, politics, society, and culture of Palestine as a whole — including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian diaspora. It looks at the long course of Palestinian history from ancient times to today, the development of Palestinian national identity, and the political and social issues Palestinians face under colonialism, occupation, and displacement. Students will critically examine the complexities of governance, resistance, economic growth, culture, and the changing role of the international community in the Palestinian situation.

This course is for FLAS fellows who have received either a graduate or undergraduate fellowship. The National Resource Center on the Middle East and North Africa (NRC-MENA) is pleased to offer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships. FLAS Fellowships are available for the study of modern Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. The fellowships aim to provide training in these languages in order to meet the national need for specialists on the Middle East region. Successful applicants should demonstrate long-term interest in the MENA region and show potential for superior academic achievement based on academic record. More information https://ccas.georgetown.edu/resources/flas/.

Rather than taking for granted what a minority population is, this course critically examines processes of minoritization and racialization across the SWANA / MENA region. We will interrogate the social and political contexts through which processes of othering are advanced, challenged, and sustained by a host of actors. In the process, this course analyzes key terms and categories deployed within and outside of the region, including sect, religion, ethnicity, race, indigeneity, settler-colonialism, Bedouin, bidoun, and others. Through ethnographies, articles, historical works, films, and podcasts, the class will chart different modes that are deployed to racialize and minoritize communities, including the governance of spaces, borders, and mobilities, via citizenship regimes, and along the vectors of class, gender, and race. We will assess how key analytical concepts travel across the region and how they relate to wider global political economic frameworks. Students will come out of the class with a firm understanding of how the organization of populations and of territories go hand in hand with processes of minoritization and racialization; how widespread assumptions about the relation between language and nationhood conceal key mechanisms of differentiation within local, national, regional contexts; and how identity and security regimes are intimately related in both highly visible and intangible ways.

The Arab world today is arguably one of the most politicized, militarized, and, thus, traumatized regions of the globe. Yet, trauma theory has had a marginalized or, at best, uneven engagement in studies of the region’s ongoing crises. In this course we will explore the major concepts and paradigms informing the fields of Arab, transnational, memory, and trauma studies, drawing critical lines of connection often unmade or unseen between these schools of thought. By studying key traumatic experiences of the 20th and 21st centuries (including but not limited to the historical and ongoing Palestinian Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Syrian Revolution) and their resultant geopolitical shifts, we will explore how the Arab world today, in particular, the Levant, has become heavily affiliated with notions of war, violence, terrorism, refugeeism, exile, and migration.

We will also be learning about and thinking through intersectional and transnational frameworks by reading critical scholarship from within and across multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The interdisciplinary critical theories we study will be grounded in analyses of various cultural productions that engage trauma and memory within and across notions of nation/national borders, religion, class, and gender. Therefore, as we read, we will pay attention to key questions such as: How does the transnational Arab world bear witness to trauma today? What role does testifying to trauma play in contemporary Arab cultural productions? Who is allowed to speak/testify and whose voices are marginalized or erased? What is the role of the listener?

By placing the transnational Arab world in conversation with the broader theoretical debates in trauma and memory studies, we will thus examine how these multiple and interdisciplinary fields of thought shape and inform one another. Doing so will allow us not only to better understand the ongoing implications of different contexts of war and violence in the contemporary Arab world, but also the ways in which we can collectively move towards healing and remembrance.

The field of transnational feminist studies is an interdisciplinary body of knowledge that examines how identities, locations, and experiences are shaped by certain assumptions and particular ways of knowing ourselves and others we may (never) encounter. How does gender studies examine the ways in which power proliferates to constitute and shape difference across multiple and intersectional axes of identity at local and global scales? What role do states play in shaping power hierarchies and social inequalities, and how have transnational feminists resisted such dominant and hegemonic formations? Attending to these questions, in this course we will examine how gender as a category of analysis and an axis of identity shapes local and global realities at the intersections of race, class, sexual, national, embodied, and religious differences in the Middle East North Africa (MENA), also known as South West Asia North Africa (SWANA). In doing so, we will examine how gender difference is constructed, articulated, and resisted across various geopolitical contexts, and in relation to specific forms of power. As we learn about historical struggles for gender, racial, and economic equality in the transnational MENA/SWANA, we will also explore what feminist critiques and resistance to patriarchy, colonialism, globalization, and war look like in relation to dominant global powers, structures, and processes today.

Arab Americans were at the center of the 2024 United States presidential election. Their vote, particularly in the swing state of Michigan, was prized by both Democrats and Republicans. But how did that come to be? This graduate seminar course answers this question—and many more.

Arabic-speaking people began migrating out of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, escaping dire economic and political crises. They mostly came from what are now the states of Syria and Lebanon, hailing from Maronite, Orthodox, Muslim, Druze, and Jewish communities, among others. Their largest populations settled in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, but we also find Arabs in countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, and Chile.

This course investigates this fascinating—and often overlooked—historical process. It starts with a discussion on the fields of migration and diaspora studies. From there, it moves to the Ottoman Empire, analyzing the world that Arab migrants left behind. The remaining weeks focus on some of the crucial features of this phenomenon, including race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. As a graduate-level course, we will pay particular attention to historiography and methodology.

We will read about Arab communities in several different countries on the continent. One of them is Brazil, where around ten percent of Congress descends from Lebanese migrants. Chile is another important case. It is where the Palestinian community is the most expressive, not just in politics but also in sports—note that their main soccer team is called Club Palestino. In Colombia, the most famous Arab descendant is Shakira, who even sings in Arabic in “Ojos Así.”

Migration is by nature a transnational and transregional phenomenon. This means that we must leave behind the rigid boundaries of the discipline of history to study it effectively. This is a course on the histories of the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States—all at the same time. It emphasizes the individuals who migrated and the communities that they formed abroad.

This course is for undergraduate and graduate students currently receiving a FLAS fellowship.

In this course, we will examine Arab and North African cinema as participatory in the fluid category of world cinema. We will study films produced from the 1950s until the present by Arab and North African filmmakers, spanning a geography between Africa and Western Asia. Through a critical study of themes, issues, and political economies pertaining to a selection of films, we will learn about social/political histories, national film industries, independent film movements, transnational film collaborations, and creative imaginaries of individuals whose works capture moments in the trajectory from modernization to globalization that has defined the region from the mid 20th century to now.

By the end of the course, students will emerge with a deeper understanding of the history of this regional cinema as a cultural and historical product reflecting a place that is culturally and ideologically diverse. Students will conduct critical readings that correspond with the film clips screened in class and assigned outside of class. Assignments consist of in-class discussions, Short Response Paper, Midterm Essay Exam, and Final Paper or Multimedia Presentation.

The connection between security and oil use can be traced to the early 20th century when the world’s naval fleets shifted to oil power. Yet today’s concept of ‘Energy Security’ has moved far beyond its historical definition, which traditionally focused on the security of energy for consuming countries. Unlike its historical definition, which focused mostly on oil security, this concept has expanded from security of oil flow to the uninterrupted flow and access to other sources of energy in today’s complex energy systems and baskets. Today, the elements of energy security include a much longer list: uninterrupted supply of oil and other sources of energy, affordable prices, security of demand, support for renewable energy resources, security of investment and overall energy facilities. The concept of ‘Energy Diplomacy’ critically examines the interplay between energy, international relations, and the emerging challenges in cybersecurity and irregular warfare within the energy sector.

This Energy Security & Diplomacy course charts the transformation of energy security, and expands our understanding of today’s concept of ‘energy security’ and ‘geopolitics of energy’ This course also aims to provide students with a deep understanding of global energy dynamics, how they influence diplomacy and geopolitics, and the modern challenges posed by the digitalization of energy infrastructure and the transition to sustainable energy sources.

Innovation is a vital process that can lead to the introduction of new ideas, methods, and products. It helps improve existing practices, accelerate development, and enable further prosperity. In the African and MENA context, innovation is charting an uneven course. Governments have either championed innovation through regulation and incentives to address youth unemployment and brain drain, or they suppressed it maintaining the privileges of a few. Despite these uncertainties, the social and economic ladder enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship represent a significant opportunity for Africa and MENA. It is driven by youth creativity, ingenuity within the informal sector, efforts by the entrepreneurial ecosystems to advocate for innovation friendly public policies, and the important role of the diaspora. AI is also playing a key role in leapfrogging development if only the right use cases and strategies are applied. In light of these trends, there has been a renewed push toward better defining what exactly is meant by and required to achieve economic development by fostering and catalyzing innovation: to what extent can innovation enhance and even disrupt Africa’s struggling economies and the prevailing bureaucracy? Can it reduce youth unemployment or is it mostly generating hope by showcasing that success is achievable without unfair advantages? Apart from innovation, are there other prerequisites for flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystems? How can African and MENA states embrace innovation in a way that will durably revitalize their economies? This 14-week course will explore the complex dynamics at work in select African and MENA countries, surrounding innovation, entrepreneurship and their impact on economic development. The course will seek to better understand how innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems are fostered, what it takes to put them into full steam, and where are their limits. Working individually and in teams, students will gain a practical understanding of innovation-led development, and obtain skills in influencing the on-going policy debate, as well as the programmatic and organizational transitions of various actors in the ecosystem. Students will challenge assumptions and examine successes, failures and track record of entrepreneurial ecosystems building policy and practice. Class discussion will center on real-world reading material and actual case studies from innovators and policy makers in Africa and MENA – i.e., ecosystem successes and failures, policy initiatives, donors reports, case studies, toolkits, operational documents, and program evaluations. Students will gain practical skills to analyze arguments, assess challenges and make recommendations on key strategy and policy issues (start up acts, IP protection, funding, AI and doing business indicators reforms).

The Muslim view is that the origins of Islamic legal code are rooted in the Muslim holy text (the Quran) and Sunnah (the portion of Muslim law based on the prophet Mohammed’s words or acts), and it is this jurisprudence that gives Islamic religious practice its connection and sustainability in everything including health law and policy. This seminar provides an overview of where Islam as a rule of law and global health intersect through subject specific segments. The seminar will start by exploring Islamic law and the history of healthcare under Islamic law and move into segments that discuss food hygiene jurisprudence, prophetic medicine as Sunnah, bioethics and Islam, mental health and Islamic law, migrant health and Islamic law, and finally sexual, reproductive and human rights under Islamic law. It presupposes the Quran and Sunnah as the legal documents and where relevant, the seminar will discuss comparative aspects to western perspectives. This seminar supports the notion that global health law is part of a growing health diplomacy where it becomes vital to understand key aspects of how culture and religion can influence health, policy and the law locally and globally.

War has been a dominating feature of the creation of the Middle East. The emergence of the contemporary Arab world coincided with the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab and Israeli leaders produced discourses on the “theory” of war in terms of the Clausewitzean notion on the intersection between the employment of “force” and achieving “political” objectives. These discourses underpinned the “nature” and “scope” of war and “escalation dynamics” that characterized the gravity and severity of the prevailing security dilemma in the Middle East.

Within this context, the course offers an introduction to foundational texts and concepts in the canon of the theory of International Relations, and strategic thought. By “foundational texts and concepts,” the course alludes to works that 1) every student of international politics will encounter at some point, and/or 2) cover central topics (theories and case studies) that will likewise be repeatedly encountered in the academy and policy field. In doing so, it undertakes a comprehensive review of the theoretical and empirical literature on interstate war. It will examine the leading theories, their key causal variables, and the paths or mechanisms through which those variables lead to war.

Applying the foundational literature on war, the course is divided into two modules: The first module investigates the puzzles of war initiation; rationalist explanations for war; bargaining; causes of war; alliances; escalation; resolve; signaling; and military doctrines; The second module analyzes coercion in terms of theories on conventional and nuclear deterrence. In addition, the course will address compellence with special emphasis on strategic bombing. The course will culminate with a debate over war termination, testing the main theories discussed, namely, the balance of power, the balance of resolve, and the balance of interests. Each lecture will be divided into two parts. The first elaborates on the conceptual framework. The second will test the theory on specific case studies in the Middle East. As a result, wars, conflicts, and crises that have occurred in the Middle East since 1948 will be investigated.

Having covered a survey of war theories, students will learn how to evaluate and present existing models, as well as how to develop their own research projects. Moreover, students will build on their critique of core theories and understanding of historical cases to better analyze current policy issues. By the end of the course, students should be able to recognize core theories and arguments in International Relations, and employ them in analyzing a specific aspect of war and coercion discourses in the Middle East.

This course examines the role and complexities of people’s agency in the Arab Middle East and North Africa through the framework of activism, protest, and social movements. It discusses the centrality of popular politics that includes activism, collective action, resistance, and protest as a force of change across the region. It investigates the reasons that enable ordinary people from different social backgrounds and outside of institutional, formal, and routine politics to join together in mass movements and voice their grievances in defiance of repressive political conditions. The course analyzes activists and protest movements’ claims against their respective regimes, the conditions that give rise to their movements and occurrence, the advantages of the political opportunities, the risks/threats they face, the organizational resources that shape their choice of activism, their success at particular points of time, and different factors that contribute or impede in achieving their goals. Finally, the course helps to understand the role protest movements, mass popular mobilizations, and revolts have been playing in the Arab world’s ongoing political transformations and argues that this dynamic is an open-ended process, questioning assumptions that depict socio-political changes as a linear process through the strict and narrow binary lens of democracy or authoritarianism.

Global Media, Digital Dystopia and the Middle East—Seminar and Lab

This interactive media seminar and lab will enable students to develop an ability to analyze and master the dynamics of modern media and the Middle East. Set in the context of global media ecosystems and trends of digital dystopia, seminar themes also will focus on: the linkages among and status of global and Middle East regional media systems and laws; information and political economies; cyber-security, privacy and surveillance societies; disinformation and misinformation; state and non-state media, actors and influencers; weaponized media and foreign policies amid the region’s shifting strategic and security alliances; existential challenges confronting civil society and journalists, and the short-lived promise of digital media, free expression, and the Arab spring.

Building on seminar themes, the media lab component will provide the opportunity to create products, such as a podcast series, online video features, or short-form documentaries, among other products, as research assignments. Media lab sessions, as a component of seminars, will provide immersion in media ethics and professionalism, and enable professor and students, as a group and individually, to work on technical skills using available online platforms. Students may opt to fulfill course requirements with traditional seminar research papers.

The Arab Gulf states are currently undergoing profound political and economic transformations at the domestic, regional, and global levels. During their state formation process in the 20th century, these states went from dependence on one natural resource, pearls, to another, fossil fuels. Home to over half of the world’s oil reserves, the Arab Gulf states have a distinct political environment. On the domestic front, the high dependence on hydrocarbon wealth coupled with the growing youthful demographic shifts has caused a dilemma in which these states endeavor to implement ambitious economic reform initiatives while attempting to maintain their political status quo. Several factors have contributed to the Arab Gulf states ascension in regional and international politics. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath presented the Arab Gulf states with a host of political and economic challenges and opportunities. Multiple divisions and armed conflicts, both within the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region, have increased because of the changing political order. The Gulf states have taken the lead in regional politics and conflicts due to their vast wealth and stability relative to the broader Middle East region. Political Islam affects many of these conflicts and remains a formidable force to either curry favor or foment rivalries across the region. Additionally, the Gulf states have used their foreign aid to shape regional politics in favor of their interests. On an international scale, the critical juncture of high oil prices during the 2008 financial crisis allowed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to take advantage of international investment opportunities in Western nations in the throes of recession. They used their economic leverage to amplify their influence and parlayed it into increased political power.

Course Objectives: The course will analyze the dynamics of these increasingly important states within the context of four themes: 1) state formation and institutional legacies 2) the domestic political landscapes attending to the politics of monarchies, parliaments, and various political blocks 3) regional politics with emphasis on conflict, aid, political Islam and hegemony 4) the ascension of the GCC states on the international scene and their relations with major powers. It will explore how these dynamics unravel for each Gulf state with attention to the varying histories, sociopolitical contexts, economic interests, different external shocks, and their strategic choices.

ARST 4452 introduces oral history methodologies and practices for recording, interpreting and preserving voices and memories of individuals and communities. This seminar offers a balance of theory and practice, with a focus on practical exercises and case studies by practitioners from the Middle East/SWANA and diasporas. Oral history epistemologies - whether academic, community-based or even intimate family portraits - involve considerable research and preparation, interviewing, preservation and the responsibilities that come with making vulnerable people's stories accessible to a variety of audiences. An oral history project may be intended for archival preservation and research, organizing and activism, or towards creation of a product: film, print publication or museum exhibit. During this course, you will be challenged ethically and creatively while selecting interviewees, conducting and recording interviews, editing and disseminating your work. You will consider how your own positionality impacts the stories you choose to investigate, facilitate and share. Final projects will result in one of the following: journalistic essay, documentary short, podcast, gallery exhibit, poetry, fiction or handcrafted object. Intended for MAAS students preparing for fieldwork or other interview-based projects, but welcoming to all undergraduates and PhDs with passionate interest in the topic.

This course incorporates a study of documentary films from across the Middle East and North Africa (SWANA), alongside and inspiring a beginning practice of documentary filmmaking. Film selections co-curated by instructor and students will include documentary and hybrid genres, historical and contemporary, to highlight diverse approaches to aesthetics, ethics and strategies of representation. Themes may range from human rights, culture and politics, environmental and social justice, gender and sexuality. Class meetings will include film screenings, student-facilitated discussions, peer review and conceptual exercises. Students will create short documentary projects individually or in small groups. Be prepared for substantial asynchronous work outside class hours.

The emergence of the “Arab Regional System” in 1945 coincided with the onset of the nuclear age. Three years later, Israel was established and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. Since the very inception of the conflict, the arms race in general and the quest for a nuclear bomb in particular came to the forefront of the war and escalation dynamics between Israel from one side and key Arab actors from the other side. The nuclear bomb has been a dominant factor in the security discourse in the Arab world. The latter found itself surrounded by a nuclear periphery, namely a nuclear-armed Israel; a nuclear-capable Iran, and a nuclear-aspirant Turkey with tactical nuclear weapons positioned on its territories. Such a trilogy has been instrumental in investigating different schools of thought about the security dilemma in the region.

Within this context, this course addresses the nuclear age in the Arab world in relation to Israel’s nuclear monopoly and the overlapping relations with Iran and Turkey. In so doing, it investigates the nuclear decisions of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Moreover, it tackles the resurgent debate about the “nuclear awakening” in the Middle East, particularly in reference to the prospect of the Saudi nuclear ambition. Throughout the course, each case is addressed within the context of underscoring the continuity and change in the nuclear discourse, namely the centrality of Israel’s nuclear posture compared to Iran’s and Turkey’s nascent nuclear ambitions.

China is an increasingly influential actor across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This course examines the pillars of Sino-MENA engagement and explores the economic, political, and sociocultural implications of growing Chinese involvement in the region. Students must consider these implications across various levels: government-to-government, firm-to-firm, and people-to-people.

The course pairs thematic classes with relevant country case studies in modules consisting of two classes, enabling students to situate key themes and theoretical concepts within specific geographic and institutional contexts. The first class of each module introduces a theme or topic, while the second class incorporates a relevant country case study. In their associated assignments, students are encouraged to delve deeper into how a particular theme applies to the designated country case study or examine how a given topic/issue has unfolded in another Middle Eastern country of their preference.

As part of the review section at the end of the course, students will be required to submit a longer comparative analysis that incorporates two or more country case studies.

In January 2016, President Obama claimed that conflicts in the Middle East “date back millennia.” The media paints the Middle East in two opposing ways: as religiously and ethnically homogeneous (Muslim/Arab), or as fraught by in-fighting between its diverse religious and ethnic groups. This class aims to critically examine the history of minorities in the making of the modern Middle East. It traces the shift from an ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman Empire to a system of nation-states defined by ethnic or religious exclusivity. The course opens with a discussion of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of diversity in the modern Middle East. The first half of the course will cover topics that examine the Ottoman millet system, the emergence of modern notions of citizenship and sectarianism in the nineteenth century, the Armenian genocide and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the role of colonialism in the politicization of ethnic and religious groups in the post-Ottoman period, as well as the role of minorities in identity politics and the formation of unifying ideologies. The second half of the course will examine the role of minorities in the states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Iraq. Finally, the course will end with a discussion of the rise of the Islamic State and the future role of minorities in today’s Middle East.

By historicizing the question of minorities in the Middle East, the course asserts the creation of minority groups is a phenomenon rooted in the modern period. In doing so, the course seeks to deconstruct sectarianism, as well as challenge exceptionalist narratives about the Middle East as essentially prone to conflict.

This course explores the history, politics, society, and culture of Palestine as a whole — including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian diaspora. It looks at the long course of Palestinian history from ancient times to today, the development of Palestinian national identity, and the political and social issues Palestinians face under colonialism, occupation, and displacement. Students will critically examine the complexities of governance, resistance, economic growth, culture, and the changing role of the international community in the Palestinian situation.

This seminar focuses on internal Palestinian politics – from the emergence of the modern Palestinian national movement in the years following the Nakba, through the trials and tribulations of the PLO in the 1970s and 80s, up to the present-day schism between Fatah and Hamas. A central focus of the course will be on the interplay between internal Palestinian politics and the peace process—how the Oslo process impacted the effectiveness of Palestinian political leaders and institutions and how the decisions by and constraints on Palestinian political actors, in turn, affected prospects for a diplomatic resolution.

The United States and the Palestinians: From Balfour to the Present

This course looks at the role of the United States in the Israel/Palestine conflict since the time of the Balfour Declaration, with a particular focus on the nature and evolution of U.S. policy and American political attitudes toward Palestine and the Palestinians over the last century. In addition to covering the origins and evolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict at various stages, the course will also look at the development of the modern Palestinian national movement—from its emergence in the years following Israel’s creation in 1948 and the ensuing Palestinian refugee crisis, through the trials and tribulations of the PLO in the 1970s and 80s, until the present-day schism between Fatah and Hamas—as well as the history of U.S. attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically, especially since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles. Specifically, the course will examine the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—how the Oslo process affected Palestinian political leaders and institutions and how the decisions by and constraints on Palestinian political actors in turn affected prospects for a diplomatic resolution. The course will conclude by examining U.S. policy and prospects for a peaceful settlement following the effective collapse of the peace process and the Trump administration’s adoption of a dramatically different approach to the conflict.

This course aims at investigating the role and complexities of people's agency in the Arab Middle East and North Africa through the framework of contentious politics and social movement theory. It discusses the links between contentious politics and social and political struggles, showing that the 2010-11 wave of mass popular mobilization, activism and resistance across the region was the outcome of a decades-long cumulative process built upon social, political and economic grievances. It sheds light on new emerging forces and counter-revolutionary actors, and argues that the fall of many autocratic rulers has created a paradigm shift in the ways Arab citizens are defining their future and conceiving of their relationship to power. Finally, the course problematizes the common Western-oriented frames of analysis used to examine the region's gradual process of change, questioning Orientalist assumptions that depict democratization as a linear process through the strictly binary lens of democracy or authoritarianism.

Heritage & Development in the Arab World explores architecture, art, manuscripts, libraries, monuments, poetry, dance and the natural environment, as well as the roles of non-governmental organizations, governments, the UN and diplomatic missions in developing and protecting heritage. Our focus will be on the Arab world, specifically Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA, often referred to as the Middle East and North Africa).

As part of the Centennial Lab component of this class, you’ll have the opportunity to travel to Egypt, allowing you to delve into Egypt’s extensive history of cultural heritage, the role of institutions in developing it, alongside the role of tourism, funding organizations, and state projects.

You will learn about the role development plays at the national and local level, as well as its role in defining and protecting cultural heritage. We will engage with issues around race, class, colorism, and other hierarchies, along settler colonialism, and delve into how they shape understandings of heritage.

By the end of this course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing heritage and development in the Arab world. Readings and the assignments are designed to enhance both your theoretical and practical knowledge, preparing you for careers in tourism, cultural and economic development, community-based projects, foreign service, military, international organizations, museums, funding agencies and more.

Learning outcomes Upon completing the course, you will have acquired the following skills and knowledge: - A solid understanding of heritage and development, and major themes and issues. - In-depth knowledge of cultural heritage specific to Egypt and the Arab world. - Enhanced skills in summarizing arguments, creating effective presentations, synthesizing material, and developing cohesive arguments. - Proficiency in working with various source materials (primary, secondary, written, visual, auditory, video) to build your knowledge and articulate your insights in ways that reflect analytical rigor. - Practical experience in project development, culminating in a four-part, semester-long project that includes creating a grant proposal and presenting a cultural heritage project seeking $250,000 in funding.

The aim of this course is to offer an overview of the key issues in the study of gender in the Middle East. It will provide a gendered understanding of prevailing discourses, ideologies, social practices and trends for those students interested in Middle East societies, cultures and politics. The course is interdisciplinary in scope, readings and theoretical underpinnings ranging from critical cultural studies to history, feminist theories, political science and media studies. We will pay particular attention not only to gender, but also to how gender is nuanced differently through the lenses of ethnicity, nationality, culture, class, religion and sexuality. The course will address issues of Representations of Gender in the Middle East, Women and Gender in Islam, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, Social Relations and Identity Constructions, Gender & Sexuality in the Middle East, Exploring Masculinities in the Middle East, Gender and Globalization in the Middle East, Feminism & Women’s Movements, and Gendering Violence and Peace in the Middle East.

This course will offer an introduction to the complex historical and contemporary relationship between the United States and the Middle East by examining the U.S. involvement in the region from the nineteenth century, with the main focus on the period of the post-Second World War to present-day.

This course will introduce students to foundational principles and strategies in research design, fieldwork, and data collection methodologies. It is a spring semester course intended for students who plan to conduct fieldwork for an MA or senior thesis in the following summer.

The course will focus on three themes. First, we will learn basic principles of research design, including how to develop strong research questions, how to engage with existing theories and literatures, and how to select appropriate cases for study. Second, we will briefly examine a range of empirical methodologies for collecting data, including interviews, ethnography, oral histories, and archival research. Note that we will not go into depth in any of these approaches; students wishing to become proficient in any particular methodology should enroll in a course dedicated to that method. Third, we will discuss various practical and ethical dimensions of fieldwork. Topics will include how to get the most out of your time in the field, how to safely protect and manage data in the field, how to ethically engage with human subjects, and the ethical implications of producing knowledge about communities that are not our own. All students will also complete an IRB application for their project as part of the course.

The focus of the course will be on preparing students for fieldwork in the Middle East / Arab World, however students intending to conduct research in other regions are also welcome. The course is required for any students in the MA in Arab Studies who intend to write a thesis. At the discretion of the instructor, it is also open to students from other MA programs and undergraduates writing senior theses.

What is the Arab world and what forces shape how we understand it? The course begins with this central question of how knowledge has historically been produced about the “Arab World” and the “Middle East” (or SWANA = Southwest Asia and North Africa) more broadly. We will examine the political and ideological forces that inform research agendas, questions and answers, as well as critiques of dominant modes of analysis. Then we shift to reading about key themes such as: culture, race, gender, development, education. For the thematic part of the course, we will draw on a variety of interdisciplinary readings. Our analysis of these readings will be attuned to the ways in which powerful structures (national, global, local; political, economic; cultural, social) shape human experience, and how people respond to, resist, embrace, transform these structures.

This seminar examines the entangled histories of race and imperial power in North Africa since the nineteenth century. Topics it covers include the role of racialization and racism in the governance of imperial subjects, changing social and scholarly conceptions of race in the contexts of Ottoman, Egyptian, Moroccan, and European rule, enslavement and attempts at its abolition, the racial dimensions of decolonization and of the domestic and international politics of anti-colonial liberation, and the effects of the imperial era on the racial politics of North African societies today. Using both historical scholarship and literature from the region, the course explores the manifold histories of race and power that have shaped modern societies from Egypt and Sudan in the east to Morocco and Mauritania in the west.

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of Egypt and Syria—two nations whose trajectories alternately converged and diverged amid the transformative events of the “long” 20th century. From shared experiences under imperial rule to the ambitious yet short-lived experiment of unification in the United Arab Republic (UAR), Egypt and Syria offer a compelling case study of cooperation, rivalry, and resilience. Key moments of unity, such as the formation of the UAR in the late 1950s and the joint military offensive of October 6, 1973, highlight their collaborative efforts. In contrast, episodes of division—such as the aftermath of the 1973 war, Egypt’s realignment with the United States following the Camp David Accords, and Syria’s enduring reliance on Soviet and later Russian support—underscore their divergent paths. The course follows these dynamics into the early 21st century, examining the upheavals of the Arab Spring and the protracted Syrian civil war. By situating these events within a region shaped by colonial legacies, ideological struggles, and persistent economic challenges, the seminar provides a valuable lens for understanding the complexities of the modern Middle East. Students will engage with key themes central to the modern histories of Egypt and Syria, including the trauma of World War I, anti-colonial resistance, the rise of nationalism, and the challenges of modernization. The course also examines the evolution of regional ideologies such as Arab socialism, Pan-Arabism, Ba‘thism/Assadism, militarism, and political Islam, while analyzing the influence of global forces like the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict on domestic and regional politics. While political history serves as an essential foundation, the course moves beyond “history from above” to center on the lived experiences of ordinary people. Their struggles, aspirations, and resilience played a crucial role in shaping national trajectories, often in ways that challenged dominant power structures. To deepen this exploration, students will engage with diverse historiographical approaches—including social, cultural, gender and women’s, diplomatic, and microhistory—developing a critical understanding of how various theoretical frameworks have shaped interpretations of these nations’ pasts. By challenging dominant narratives and foregrounding marginalized voices, the course encourages students to appreciate the region’s rich, complex, and often overlooked historical dimensions.

The course departs from traditional rentier state theory (RST) and its normative framework of analysis that denies agency to societies in the Gulf Arab states and frames them as passive, dominated by oil revenues. The curriculum provides a meso- and micro-perspective of the sociopolitical dynamics of the Gulf Arab states (i.e., Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). It examines in-depth social transformations at play in the Gulf Arab societies while addressing critical issues, including but not limited, to diversity of social structure, tribal dynamics, gender patterns, youth activism, citizenship and belonging, social hierarchies, labor migration and racial capitalism, neoliberal urban governance, western higher education and knowledge production, entertainment industry, mobilization and dissent, etc. The comprehensiveness of the course is somewhat unavoidable, given the wide range of issues societies in the Gulf Arab states are experiencing. However, the aim of the course is to deconstruct, challenge and de-exceptionalize certain static frames presented as the primary explanatory matrix of these societies with enough detail in the reading materials offered and the hoped-for debates.

The class will address specific topics related to displacement into and from southwest Asia (Arab world, Iran, Turkey, Israel) and north Africa. We will address contemporary displacement, focusing on IDPs and Refugees, as well as humanitarian and aid responses to displacement. When possible, we will also address resettlement and return. We will learn about the institutional and legal regimes related to addressing displacement, as well as understanding how displacement is experienced and understood. The goal behind this approach is a layered reading to develop a holistic approach to how we understand, write about, present, propose policies for, and advocate for displaced people.

What to do about Palestine has been one of the most hotly debated questions over the past century or more. In this seminar we will explore those debates from the onset of the modern Zionist movement through the present day. Students will engage with primary sources including official testimonies, public speeches and events, published articles, broadcasted programs and more on a weekly basis to understand how arguments from all perspectives were being made and how they have evolved over time. By the end of the course students will have not only learned about the history of the Palestinian struggle with Zionism over the past century through the prism of impassioned and informed debate, but they will also gain an appreciation for how these issues have been argued over and why and how those arguments mattered and changed over time.

The emergence of the “Arab Regional System” in 1945 coincided with the onset of the nuclear age. Three years later, Israel was established and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. Since the very inception of the conflict, arms race in general and the quest for a nuclear bomb in particular came to the forefront in the war and escalation dynamics between Israel from one side and key Arab actors from the other side. The nuclear bomb has been a dominant factor in the security discourse in the Arab world. The latter found itself surround by a nuclear periphery, namely a nuclear-armed Israel; a nuclear-capable Iran, and a nuclear-aspirant Turkey with tactical nuclear weapons positioned on its territories. Such a trilogy has been instrumental in investigating different schools of thought about the security dilemma in the region.

Within this context, this course addresses the nuclear age in the Arab world in relation to Israel’s nuclear monopoly and the overlapping relations with Iran and Turkey. In so doing, it investigates the nuclear decisions of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Moreover, it tackles the resurgent debate about the “nuclear awakening” in the Middle East, particularly in reference to the prospect of the Saudi nuclear ambition. Throughout the course, each case is addressed within the context of underscoring the continuity and change in the nuclear discourse, namely the centrality of Israel’s nuclear posture compared to Iran’s and Turkey’s nascent nuclear ambitions.

This one-credit course is for undergraduate Arab Studies Certificate students to work on their capstone paper for the certificate. This course should be taken in the student's final semester.

Popular Culture, Power, & Identity: Ethnography of Media and Minorities of the Middle East

This graduate seminar will examine the dynamics of popular culture and mass media in the Middle East, including the Arabic-speaking nations, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and North Africa. Although performative and expressive arts, mass media, and popular culture have previously been dismissed as epiphenomenal in Middle Eastern Studies, this course proceeds from the idea that popular culture and performance are in fact foundational means for negotiating power and resistance, social interactions between ethnic/religious groups, and intersectional identity. Popular culture and performance practices as communicative events through which social relations are organized, constituted, and critiqued. Our readings build upon fundamental anthropological understandings of social groups, of structure and agency, and of power in social life. Students will confront the many ways in which popular culture has had a formative and foundational impact on conceptions of self and others in the Middle East with special regard to religious and ethnic minorities in the region. Ethnographic case studies will explore expressions of resistance, consent, and belonging of ethnoreligious and minority communities across the Middle East. This course asks students to evaluate differing expressions of belonging by Ethiopian Israelis, Lebanese Christians, Moroccan Berber, Turkish Secular Muslims, Egyptian Copts, Golani Druze, Iraqi Shi’a, and more. This course takes a special interest in Druze throughout the Middle East and how they negotiate forms of belonging decided on national and local levels.

This course is designed to enhance students' Arabic language skills—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—while exploring contemporary Syrian literature across various genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. Through the analysis and discussion of selected texts, students will develop their proficiency in Arabic while gaining insight into the historical and cultural context of Syrian literary traditions.

Students will engage in structured activities to practice their language skills, including weekly reflection assignments that encourage critical thinking and language development, as well as class discussions to strengthen their speaking and listening abilities. The course will culminate in a presentation where students will demonstrate their improved proficiency by analyzing an aspect of modern Syrian literature.

This course aims to strengthen students’ Arabic reading, listening, and speaking skills while providing them with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to study Arabic literary texts produced by intellectual prisoners. Students will explore the motives, themes, and stylistic features of prison writing, as well as its mutual relationship with the structures of Arab authoritarian regimes, society, and culture. Prison literature encompasses works written by prisoners either during their incarceration or after their release. It also includes works by authors who were never imprisoned themselves but who drew inspiration from the accounts of others, or who imagined such experiences in order to contribute to this literary tradition. This body of literature spans poetry, novels, plays, short stories, biographies, and memoirs, and serves as a powerful lens through which to examine both the individual experience of confinement and the broader dynamics of repression, resistance, and cultural expression in the Arab world.

Course Description: This course offers an exploration of Arab feminism as depicted in literature, including novels and short stories. It is structured in two parts: the first part introduces students to the vocabulary and concepts of Arab feminism through various media; the second part involves an in-depth analysis of representative works of Arab feminist literature. This course is conducted entirely in Arabic.

Course Objectives: Enhance students' proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and presenting in Arabic. Develop an understanding of feminist issues and themes in Arab literature. Foster an inclusive learning environment respecting all backgrounds and perspectives.

Through the study of Arabic novels, this course aims to teach students how to analyze literary works with political content and ideas, and helps them to learn how writers express their political views and represent the currents of political movements in their novels. This course is taught in Arabic.

The class will address specific topics related to displacement in the Arab World and the framing of humanitarian and aid responses. It will include issues related to refugees, internally displaced populations (IDPs), and humanitarian access during conflict. The course requires that students use quantitative or qualitative methods to analyze original data available in the course related to the above issues. Students will choose one of these methodological tracks and will develop those skills over the course of the semester. The class will culminate with student projects using the knowledge developed in the course coupled with the students' analytical and research methods that produce rigorous material for dissemination. Students will bring a broad familiarity with displacement issues to the class or extensive knowledge of the Arab world. Those with more specialized knowledge of either displacement issues or the Arab World or of quantitative or qualitative skills are particularly welcomed.

The course will focus on the displacement, internal and external, of the people in the Middle East. Given the current events in the region, the course will zoom in on certain areas, in particular Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and Palestine. By analyzing humanitarianism, human agency, and aid, the course is designed to encourage us to re-think how we conceive of displaced people within academic, development, and policy perspectives. We will address issues concerned with citizenship, borders, rights, law, human agency, and history, with the intent to include all of these into our perspectives on how we understand displaced people, talk about them, advocate for them, develop policies around them, and “manage” these crises of refugees in and outside the region.

The complexity of water as a multi-dimensional strategic resource has been extensively highlighted in recent years. Its vital importance is exacerbated in arid and semi-arid regions such as the Middle East. By reviewing trends in the scholarship, the course addresses some of the conceptual and contemporary issues relating to the impacts and effects of managing shared water resources in the context of armed conflicts, settler-colonialism and within inequitable historical, political and economic structures. By providing a combination of theory and case-study analysis, the objective is to introduce students to the scholarly and policy debates that continue to animate the realm of international relations and environmental politics. By the end of term, students should be able to understand issues relating to hydropolitics and the potential for social and political conflict. power asymmetry in international river basins and the weaponization of water resources, climate, water and food security. Considering the many international dimensions of water, the discussions will also incorporate policy, economic, environmental and legal perspectives. The course aims to provide students with theoretical tools to analyze situations of water cooperation and conflict. Empirical cases will be mainly drawn from the Middle East, with additional insights from other regions (Europe, Africa).

Visions of revamped natures and sanitized communities were common across the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, as they are today. Governments of many stripes attempted to “improve” environments, to “modernize” rural economies, and to mold national identities. This course examines the wielders of social, economic, political and environmental power who transformed the modern MENA region, and the human and non-human actors that challenged them. It studies the utopian designs of empires and newly powerful states, and the alternate ways of living that these governments attempted to eradicate. It travels from high plateaus to malarial swamps, and from fertile plains to dry deserts, to interrogate the relationship between nature, power, and identity in the modern societies of the Middle East and North Africa. Several questions guide the course. What is the relationship between nature and power in the modern Middle East and North Africa? What imaginaries about the region’s environments have shaped social life, state policies and practices, and outsiders’ approaches to the region? The Middle East and North Africa are commonly grouped together for cultural and historical reasons—is there an environmental unity to this broad space as well? And finally, how global is the environmental history of the modern Middle East and North Africa?

What are the properties of oil-led political development? Are countries cursed by natural resources or institutions? Is the concept of “Rentier State” a useful tool to understand distributive politics in oil-dependent countries? Does oil lead to political stability? What are the patterns of public investments in oil-dependent developing countries? Is there a Gulf States exceptionalism and why? And what explains the variation in economic diversification across oil-exporting countries?

Oil and natural resources have given rise to three distinct waves of academic literature. First, the Rentier State literature in Political Science focused on the effect of oil on political outcomes. Second, the Economics literature on the Resource Curse focused on the economic consequences of resource abundance. Third, recent literature on rentier states and the resource curse has increasingly focused on the conditional effect of rents on both political and economic development. Specifically, it finds that leaders' behavior is critical in explaining economic outcomes. By integrating institutions and political incentives in the study of oil, scholars have found that states have substantial leeway to mitigate negative macroeconomic consequences and leverage the large inflows of capital brought about by natural resource extraction.

The course will introduce students to the theoretical debates and issues surrounding natural resources in general, and oil in particular. Drawing from both the Economics and the Political Science literature, it will investigate the link between oil and politics in Arab countries. The objective of the course is threefold: it will (1) provide students with a solid understanding of the key scholarly debates pertaining to oil both in Politics and Economics; (2) introduce them to the changes in research agendas that have appeared over the last ten years; and (3) provide specific knowledge on the oil sector, and examine what the future of oil-dependent countries looks like.

The course will offer an overview of key topics. It will be divided into the following subsections: oil and regime type; oil and the development of institutions; oil and political stability; oil and economic development; and, finally, economic diversification of oil-dependent countries. The course will begin with introducing the students to two important debates surrounding oil resources: the politics of rent-seeking, and the endogeneity of oil revenues/resources.

Realism, as an established school of thought, suggests that war is the dominating feature of international politics. The emergence of the contemporary Arab world coincided with the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab countries produced discourses on the “theory” of war in terms of the Clausewitzean notion on the intersection between the employment of “force” and the “political” objectives. In addition, they produced divergent reactions to the “reputation” and “credibility” of threats signaled by their adversaries. These discourses underpinned the “nature” and “scope” of war and “escalation dynamics” that characterized the gravity and severity of the prevailing security dilemma in the Middle East.

Within this context, the course is guided by an International Relations perspective. It undertakes a comprehensive review of the theoretical and empirical literature on interstate war. It will examine the leading theories, their key causal variables, the paths or mechanisms through which those variables lead to war. Therefore, the course applies the foundational literature to investigating the puzzles of war initiation, war termination, and the bargaining and coercion models. In doing so, the course will extensively cite Arab scholarly and primary sources to compare and contrast with the dominant western theories.

This seminar explores the production of the Minority as a category of analysis, practice, domination, and resistance. By delving into the historiography of the global production of the minority, this seminar will assess questions of biopolitics, eugenics, humanism, home, migration, and belonging to contextualize the emergence of Nationalism and Sectarianism in the SWANA region.

We assess broader cultural and intellectual histories involved in shaping the concept of the minority: Our readings will begin by tracing the genealogies of the colonial formation of humanism and the civilizational narratives embedded within them to historicize the practices involved in generating the ‘minority’ in theory and practice. We then shift to the political developments of the 20th Century which see the emergence of minority rights, human rights, humanitarianism, humanism, and the international biopolitical system emerging from that era. We will explore the formation of institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to understand how neoliberal humanism shapes the formation of nation-states through practices such as forced migration, border policing, occupations, settler colonialism, and the divvying of geographies to ensure the homogeneity of nation-states.

Our case studies will focus on the SWANA region to study the relationship between colonial and imperial histories, the commodification of culture and difference, the biopoliticization of bodies, and the reconfiguration of geographies through spatial politics and policies. We will examine how the production of nation-states necessitated the homogenization of populations, thus further strengthening the concept of the minority. Our case studies offer an analysis of minority-making in places such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey. We will explore how the formation of the sectarian governmentality mobilizes different national identities and discourses and how their political implications on the region.

This course explores the history of the Arab World in the twentieth century, focusing on its political, intellectual, social, and cultural dimensions. Key themes include the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of World War I, the impact of European colonialism, the ideologies and practices of movements for independence, the Nakba, migration and citizenship, the rise and fall of Nasserism, Third Worldism, state and cultural production, corporate colonialism, and state-building. One of the goals of the course is the acquisition of a basic understanding of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and of broad patterns in the political, social, and cultural development of the region during the period. We also examine a variety of ways in which historians have approached the region, including social history, colonial and postcolonial history, memory studies, cultural history, the history of gender, transnational history, micro history, diplomatic history, and the history of war and violence. We are concerned with the kinds of questions historians working in these sub-fields have raised and the methods and approaches they have taken to the study of the Arab World, as well as the analyses they offer In addition, we focus on the ways in which historians use primary sources and the kinds of sources that are available for the writing of the history of the Arab World in the modern period. Students will develop their abilities to identify and work with primary sources as an essential research skill.

This course provides a critical introduction to the main paradigms, methods, and approaches that have been used to study the Arab world. From Oriental Studies, modernization theory, and area studies to the disciplinary social sciences, we explore how specific social, historical, and political contexts affect knowledge production in and on the Arab Middle East and North Africa.

From the Imperial, to the National, to the Global: History of Migration and Displacement in the Middle East Migration is an old phenomenon of spatial mobility. It has different forms, degree of involvement by the state, and has decisive economic, social, political and cultural implications. Migration is directly linked to global political events including wars, revolutions, change of the political system, and nation building. It is also linked to the occurrence of natural disasters and the discovery of natural resources.

This seminar examines the various forms of spatial mobility into, out of, within, and across the Middle East and North Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. Students will learn how the contemporary Middle East, society, politics and history is shaped by these patterns of migrations. The course will address the root causes of displacement and migration, migrants’ trajectories and emphasizes the agency of migrants, gender differences in the experiences and effects and the cultural effects of the home and host countries. This course is organized along two historical periods: imperial and post-imperial including colonial and the nation-state periods. Each period is organized to include themes of natural disasters and disease, gender, labor, religion and ethnicity, memory and cuisines while covering the various areas of the Middle East and North Africa. The assigned readings are primarily from the field of history, but other works as well as theoretical frameworks for analyzing migration and displacement are interdisciplinary from anthropology, sociology, literature, gender studies and political science. There will be strong emphasis on including primary sources in Arabic and English or other accessible languages. For their research papers, students who have a strong command of Arabic, English, Spanish, German or French are encouraged to include primary sources in their research.

This course is designed to provide students with the basic structure of Iraq’s political and socio-economic history from World War I to the present day through readings drawn from some of the most important books and articles in English. The class will examine the main political parties of that period (the Iraqi Communist Party and the Ba‘th Party); the various sectarian and tribal communities of Iraq and their interaction with the elites. Finally, the course will consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its implications. The syllabus will have some of the writings of famous poets, and recipes of Iraqi food to give a flavor of the country from all aspects.

The course is split into three parts: Part I will deal with Iraq's history from the mandate period, the monarchy, the republic, and the rise of the Ba`th party. Part II will focus on the three wars that impacted Iraq and the region as a whole: the Iraq-Iran War, 1980-1988; the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1990-91; and finally, Part III will focus on the decade that preceded the US invasion of Iraq. We will analyze how each war affected not only Iraq but the whole Middle East. Restrictions: Exclude first-year students (freshmen)

This course explores how race and ethnicity constituted difference, governance, and citizenship in the modern Middle East and North Africa. The course therefore begins in 1750 to appreciate the changes and continuity the experience of modernity involves, while ending in 2015 with a snapshot of race and ethnicity in our contemporary moment. We will look at a variety of processes that historians understand to be central to the making of the modern MENA (e.g., the introduction of modern techniques of governance, the spread of market relations, the reconfiguration of social categories, and the emergence of a public sphere), and their 20th-century intensification and territorial encaging through the contemporary state system of the region. We will engage with trans-regional dynamics such as colonialism, nationalism, sectarianism, and mass politics at same time that we attend to specificities such as the Armenian Genocide, the differential trajectories of struggle for Kurdish equality in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and anti-Blackness in each of North Africa and the Levant. How are race and ethnicity productive categories of analysis for making sense of this history? What place did processes of racialization have throughout—not just in the encounter between European/US (read white) imperialism and local (read non-white) regimes/movements, but also within and between the societies and social groups of the region. We will read across the fields of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Middle East Studies (overlaps notwithstanding) to explore the concepts of race, ethnicity, and their relationship, how and why they should matter to our understanding of the region, and how MENA scholars—past and present—have addressed (or not) questions of race and ethnicity. We will therefore be informed by the work and urgency of anti-racism as a mode of political and intellectual work to analyze both the history and historiography of race and ethnicity in the modern Middle East and North Africa.

The purpose of this class is to discuss and investigate different forms of civil-social activism, particularly civil society actors and social movements in North Africa. In fact, decades of civil resistance, mobilization, disobedience, dissent, and contestation of the post-colonial political order all over North African countries (i.e. Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) preceded the wave of 2010-2011 popular uprisings that shook the region. Civil-social activism emerged as a result of restrictive public space and limited political opening under resilient authoritarianism. While the co-optation and infiltration of civil society by North African autocratic regimes have weakened activism; however, oppression developed a culture of opposition and resistance that challenged and ultimately eroded the state's legitimacy. Given the different levels of organizations within North African societies, each society experienced its own trajectory of civil-social activism. The widespread arbitrary violence inflicted by security apparatus on citizens combined to the retreat of the state from its social role, subsequently to the implementation of a chaotic neoliberalism, and the rise of kleptocratic nepotism have strengthened civil-social activism in these societies. Human rights activists, union workers, lawyers bar associations, journalists, political leaders, women activists, and youth among other actors contributed to a greater extent to the development of vibrant public space for social and political struggles in countries where democratic mechanisms of power contestation and regulation have been absent. Arguably, civil-social activism has opened the public space to more polarized and divided social actors due to ideological rivalry and cultural identities. Notwithstanding the difficulties in overcoming these divergences, civil-social activism through a pluralistic engagement and formal and informal networks of organizations and movements that arose before and during the 2010-2011 popular uprisings across North African societies could lead to the growth of authentic and legitimate activism as a mode of socio-political expression, and a potential generator of democratization process.

This course allows students to acquire an in-depth understanding of Syrian politics. It introduces the historical development of the state and society in Syria, explores the country's evolving political economy, and studies the relationship between ideology and identity. Applying theoretical frameworks from the wider literature in comparative politics, we will look at issues such as sectarianism; communal politics; military rule; social class; authoritarianism; economic liberalization; civil society; and popular uprisings, including the origins and development of the ongoing civil war. This course will be of interest to students with some previous knowledge of Middle East politics who wish to deepen their understanding of this complex and fascinating country.

Security remains one of the most controversial and contested concepts in international politics. Traditional perspectives focus mainly on the national and military security of states in the Global North. Critical security studies have broadened the agenda. Some schools focus on the security of individuals and communities, others challenge the inequitable structures of the international system for countries in the Global South. Since the 1990s, the concepts of human and environmental security have also shaped the international policy agenda. This course introduces students to different schools in the field of critical security. What constitutes security? Whose security is at stake? What is the underlying critique raised by these alternative perspectives? What is human security, how does it fit within this agenda? What is environmental security? And what are the emerging threats for individuals and communities? Through a combination of conceptual tools and contemporary analysis, the students will explore some of the new security challenges of the Middle East from the perspective of human, environmental and critical security. They will be encouraged to establish comparisons with other regions (Africa, Latin America). Some of the security implications under consideration include the impacts of climate change, access to food, displacement/migration, health security, gender and identity politics.

This course is in line with a comparative study of the post-colonial politics of the North African region – specifically the states of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. It aims at providing a thorough overview of present-day North Africa with an emphasis on the field of politics and society. The course examines key issues such as ideology, national belief systems, the nature of political trends (i.e., authoritarian persistence and struggle for democracy), political actors, Islamist politics, economic challenges, transitional justice, sub-national identity (i.e., Amazighness and Berberness), and people grassroots politics, among other issues. It offers in-depth insight into the political development and contrasting trajectories of North African countries experienced during and in the post 2010-11 Arab uprisings. Additionally, it sheds light on the difficulties facing the political transitional processes and persistent challenges that these countries have been facing since 2011. Finally, the course assesses the region’s interaction with key external actors chief among them the European Union as well as the United States.

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of Egypt and Syria—two nations whose trajectories alternately converged and diverged amid the transformative events of the “long” 20th century. From shared experiences under imperial rule to the ambitious yet short-lived experiment of unification in the United Arab Republic (UAR), Egypt and Syria offer a compelling case study of cooperation, rivalry, and resilience. Key moments of unity, such as the formation of the UAR in the late 1950s and the joint military offensive of October 6, 1973, highlight their collaborative efforts. In contrast, episodes of division—such as the aftermath of the 1973 war, Egypt’s realignment with the United States following the Camp David Accords, and Syria’s enduring reliance on Soviet and later Russian support—underscore their divergent paths. The course follows these dynamics into the early 21st century, examining the upheavals of the Arab Spring and the protracted Syrian civil war. By situating these events within a region shaped by colonial legacies, ideological struggles, and persistent economic challenges, the seminar provides a valuable lens for understanding the complexities of the modern Middle East.

Students will engage with key themes central to the modern histories of Egypt and Syria, including the trauma of World War I, anti-colonial resistance, the rise of nationalism, and the challenges of modernization. The course also examines the evolution of regional ideologies such as Arab socialism, Pan-Arabism, Ba‘thism/Assadism, militarism, and political Islam, while analyzing the influence of global forces like the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict on domestic and regional politics.

While political history serves as an essential foundation, the course moves beyond “history from above” to center on the lived experiences of ordinary people. Their struggles, aspirations, and resilience played a crucial role in shaping national trajectories, often in ways that challenged dominant power structures. To deepen this exploration, students will engage with diverse historiographical approaches—including social, cultural, gender and women’s, diplomatic, and microhistory—developing a critical understanding of how various theoretical frameworks have shaped interpretations of these nations’ pasts. By challenging dominant narratives and foregrounding marginalized voices, the course encourages students to appreciate the region’s rich, complex, and often overlooked historical dimensions.

This course is grounded in a sociological perspective of the Arabian Peninsula which questions statist representations shown in certain imagery, literature and discourses constructed by those who control and exercise power while deconstructing some established frames as the sole explanations for these societies’ dynamics. The course provides a look into the sociopolitical dynamics of the Gulf Arab states (i.e., Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) and their role in shaping their domestic evolutionary trends. It provides an in-depth perspective on social transformations and political dynamics at play in Gulf Arab societies, including diversity of social structure and change, public involvement in shaping social and political life as well as emergence of different forms of social mobilization and dissent. It critically surveys and reflects on important issues including tribal dynamics, gender patterns and family trends, youth political engagement and activism, citizenship and belonging, sharp social hierarchies and statelessness, labor migration, entertainment industry, racial capitalism, neoliberal urbanism and rapid transformations of physical landscape across Gulf cities, among other issues. The course will discuss the role of religion and competing nationalisms as both legitimizing variables for the ruling elites as well as elements undermining some of them, prompted by doctored domestic sectarianism and identity politics that has facilitated sectarianization of domestic politics, translated into further uncertainties and contingencies, mainly during and in the aftermath of the 2010-11 Arab popular uprisings. Finally, the course concludes with deconstruction of assumptions and conventional discourses surrounding Yemen amid regional and global domination

This course examines some of the conceptual and contemporary issues relating to the analysis of negotiation processes and their contribution to international/regional dynamics of conflict and cooperation. It addresses the functions and core elements of negotiation and mediation, the inherent power dynamics (symmetry, asymmetry) and the role and influence of culture. Students will participate in negotiation simulations at the end of the seminar. By focusing on theories of negotiation and mediation, the course aims to provide students with conceptual tools to analyze empirical case studies relating to the negotiation and mediation of peace agreements in the Middle East, the end of ethnic conflicts and international multilateral negotiations.

This class seeks to provide an overview of Arab civil-military relations (CMR) and their implications in state-building, regional political dynamic, and national identities. It will discuss key CMR scholarship theoretical concepts and applies them to different cases, from the most prominent ones (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Mauritania, Sudan, Yemen) to the less politically influential, though critical to the regime survival (Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, GCC states). Comparative CMR analyses with African, Latin American and Asian countries will be used to enhance our understanding of the specific nature of CMR within the Arab context. The course will highlight the reactions and behavior of Arab militaries to the challenges of 2010-11 mass-popular uprisings. It will investigate their role in the post-authoritarian era. It will discuss whether or not they will be prone to endure reform through democratic security governance, which implies substantial transformation of CMR as well as the security sector (including domestic security apparatuses), mainly through oversight mechanisms and legitimate democratic control, among others.

The course, an interdisciplinary one, will analyze how politics, economics, and social factors interact in authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. The course will begin by looking at some general literature on authoritarianism and the political economy of authoritarianism (including non-Arab cases), then moves to look at different countries in the region. The seminar will explore the way authoritarian regimes work in practice; why do some last longer than others, and what are their characteristics.

The aim of the class is also to understand how life was shaped by authoritarianism. The last lessons will be devoted to looking at post-authoritarian regimes from political and economic points of view.

Arts and Cultures of the Arab World This course will address contemporary cultural production in the Arab World, focusing on arts, literature, music, and other cultural material from the present. We will focus on how culture and art relate to global and national projects and civil society, and the roles of culture creators, such as artists, poets, writers, musicians, etc. We will read/watch/view primary artistic and cultural material as well as study how governmental, media, and non-governmental authorities approach arts and cultures and into the realms of everyday life, whether that is through education systems, museums, television and radio, etc. Students will develop a broad understanding of cultural and artistic production as well as gain familiarity with theories related to understanding cultural production. They will engage regularly with art, music, and literature throughout the class and develop their own research projects on the subject in the course.

MAAS students who are taking part in a curricular-related internship may enroll in the following 0.25 credit ARST Internship course, pending approval from the MAAS Director and Assistant Director of Academic Programs. Internships must take part across a minimum of 8 hours to be eligible.

ARST 518 -- Culture and Society of the Arab World Professors Fida Adely & Rochelle Davis Spring 2023: Thursday 3:30-6:00

In this course, students study contemporary Arab society in both broad conceptual terms as well as specific topics and case studies. We begin with some initial readings and discussion about studying society and culture with an attention to the varied ways in which communities in the Arab world view and organize themselves. We will read eight dynamic and different books that cover different aspects of contemporary Arab society, and we will also engage with films and other media. The course will be led as a seminar with the majority of the time devoted to discussion and critical understanding of the material.

We will divide the class into two parts. The first will delve into the role of the state and issues related to the creation of modern nations, gender, labor, and art. The second part will allow us to discuss issues around race, religion, and ethnicity, through texts that address memory and belonging. The course will examine how these concepts, and the meanings attached to them, are understood and constructed locally by a variety of actors who experience and understand them differently given where they are situated within the Arab world even as the local is in turn shaped by national and global forces.

This course examines contemporary issues in the international politics of the Middle East and introduces students to core theoretical debates and interdisciplinary perspectives relevant to understanding current developments. Rather than being organized around traditional schools of thought, the course is structured around major questions and key issues emerging from different subregions within the region itself. It critically addresses biases in the field by examining the imperial and colonial origins of the study of international relations and incorporates perspectives from a diverse range of scholars from and working on the region. The course explores questions such as: What constitutes mainstream perspectives in the field? What critiques are offered by alternative and critical approaches? Why is the field of international relations often described as hegemonic, Western-centric, imperialist, or racist? How do new scholarly voices contribute to decentering and decolonizing the field? What emerging perspectives are shaping contemporary understandings of the region? Through a combination of conceptual, historical, and political analysis, students are encouraged to examine the relationships between domestic politics and regional and international processes; war and peace-making; foreign policy analysis; security politics; and the strategic importance of key resources such as gas, oil, water, and food. While not intended to be exhaustive, the course provides a broad and interdisciplinary framework that enables students to engage with a wide range of conceptual and empirical issues and to understand how these issues intersect and interact in shaping the international politics of the Middle East.

This course introduces students to the politics and society of the Middle East by exploring some of the main political and social problems facing the region today. The topics covered emerge from academic, policy, and everyday debates about real-world questions and challenges that have affected and continue to affect the lives of people in the region. We will debate these questions ourselves, and scrutinize how they have been studied and analyzed in academic scholarship. We will also dwell on more fundamental questions of how research agendas emerge, which questions end up being studied and why, and the relationship between area studies knowledge and general theories of comparative politics. Each week we will read four important works that each in their own way seek to make sense of a set of puzzles or questions related to that week’s topic. These works include a mix of ‘classic’ texts in the field of Middle East comparative politics and newer research on the same questions. The focus of the course is on the 20th and 21st centuries, though occasionally we may discuss more historical periods. The course is structured as a survey and, as such, we will be aiming to cover a broad range of topics, including: state formation, authoritarianism, oil and rentierism, political Islam, sectarianism, informal politics, and the Arab Spring revolutions. The topics we will cover are certainly not exhaustive, but they are selected to capture some of the most significant debates and questions that have motivated research on the region. Students will have the opportunity in their final assignments to delve more deeply into one of these topics, or to explore one that we haven’t covered in the course.

Possibly no issue related to the Arab world has garnered more attention than the status of women. This course will situate current preoccupations with women in the Arab world in historical and comparative perspective, and within broader theoretical debates about gender and sexuality. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, we will consider the ways in which class, ethnicity, geography, religion, and culture shape the status, experiences, and desires of women in the region. Moving beyond a focus on women, we will also consider how conceptions of femininity and masculinity are constructed over time, and how in turn these concepts shape ideas about love, family, politics, and appropriate gender relations. Finally, the course will also situate the fields of women and gender studies in the Arab world in the larger debates and shifts within feminist theory, examining the ways in which scholarship in and about the region has emerged in conversation with broader feminist theories and projects.

This course is a graduate level seminar, which assumes some prior coursework related to the history, society, and/or culture of the region. Advanced level undergraduates will also be considered for enrollment in the course. Specific goals for students in the course are to: 1. Develop familiarity with key concepts and theories of gender, sexuality and gender relations. 2. Understand the ways in which historical, political and socio-economic contexts shape the experiences (opportunities and limits) of differently situated women. Students will develop these skills through careful reading of rich and varied sources from a range of disciplines, class discussions, and analytical writing. 3. Develop the analytical skills needed to identify basic assumptions that undergird discussions about gender in the Arab world. Students will develop these skills through close and careful reading, historical and comparative analysis, class discussions, and analytical writing. 4. Apply tools of gendered analysis to a range of social, political and cultural experiences. 5. Analyze and interpret a variety of “cultural products” for the ways in which they represent gender differences, transformations and conflicts. 6. Develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the experience of males in the region are gendered and how their gendered experiences are intertwined with those of women. 7. Through research, writing, and presentations, develop specific knowledge and expertise about a particular group or community, and/or the gendered dimensions of a specific issue of interest to the student.

This course takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to development in the Arab world. It examines development as a discourse, a political project and as a range of interventions undertaken by diverse actors (local, national, and beyond). We will consider the following questions: What is development? How have notions of development, and beliefs about how best to promote it, shifted over time? What are the political interests that shape and define development problems and provide the parameters within which development solutions are constructed and imagined? What are the most pressing human development issues in the region? What are the obstacles to development? What does development mean given the political and economic contexts of the contemporary Arab world?

This course will provide a general overview of the economies of Arab countries since 1945. Given the wide scope of the topic and the number of weeks we have, not all countries are covered, and some, such as the countries in North Africa or the Gulf states, are banded together. The first two classes will set the historical and general background for the period under study. The next seven classes will be focused on the following countries: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Countries, and finally North Africa. In each of those classes, we examine the economic history of the country, its main political economy issues, and look at its current economic situation. The last four classes deal with general topics that are important across the board such as globalization, labor and migration, Arab economic integration, Islamic economics and finance, and finally the performance of those countries in the last half of the century on an absolute and relative basis.

This course explores the interplay of knowledge and power in the constitution of educational institutions and policies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as in defining appropriate and desirable forms of knowing, teaching and learning. In the course, we will examine a number of key questions related to education in MENA, namely:

-How are educational institutions and “legitimate” forms of knowledge shaped by religious, economic, cultural and political forces? -How did colonization and other Western interventions shape education in MENA and what are its enduring effects? -How has the expansion of state-funded public schooling contributed to the processes of state formation and power consolidation in the region? What have been the unintended effects of these processes? -What are the primary debates, tensions and challenges related to educational developments in the region today? -How have global educational policies, assessments and measures come to shape educational policy in the region?

What is education for? What is quality education? How does what is measureable frame and/or limit educational goals or perceptions of educational quality? How can we assess pedagogical goals not easily measured? In this six-week course, we will engage critically with each of these questions with a particular focus on what we know about quality education in the Arab world. The intellectual engagement with these questions will provide the basis for work on an educational case study throughout the class. In particular, we will consider the challenges of assessing the efficacy of a non-formal education program that has been functioning in Jordan for over 10 years. The assignments for this course will be very specifically related to the case, and students will be tasked with designing an assessment that addresses: 1) how effective the program is in meeting pedagogical goals; 2) the effects of this program on teacher pedagogy across different contexts; and/or 3) the potential of such a program to inform dropout prevention policies in a public school system.

Prerequisites: This course is designed for students who have taken ARST 611 (Knowledge, Power and Politics: Education in the Middle East & North Africa) or ARST 640 (Development in the Arab World). Students who have not taken either of these classes will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Course Goals: • Students will familiarize themselves with some of the ways in which quality education is defined and measured, and the limits of these measures. • Students will learn about the existing research on quality education in the Arab world, assess the research critically, and identify educational goals and methods reflected in this literature. • Students will be exposed to a variety of ideas about what constitutes quality teaching and what empirically we know about teaching in the Arab world. They will learn to distinguish between outcomes-based frameworks for assessing quality, and those more grounded in a concern with pedagogy (i.e. teaching and learning processes). • Students will develop their own measures of educational quality, as well as tools of assessment for an alternative non-formal education program in Jordan. In the process they will learn about a range of qualitative assessment techniques, and to identify the most suitable techniques for the case at hand.

The practice of writing biographies and autobiographies has a long history in both Western and Arabic civilizations. Historians have been challenged by the subjectivity of personal memoirs since the days of chronicling the Romans. Given the lack of archival resources in the Arab world, the recollections gathered in memoirs of all types can help bring the past to life in remarkable ways. The course will present both academic discussions of memoirs and then readings from different countries in all the important political spheres of life in the region. Memoirs shedding light on the military, political parties, economy, security services, and cult of personality will be read and discussed. In some cases, we will read from different angles: for example, with regard to security services, we will study both memoirs of security chiefs and political prisoners. Many readings will be in Arabic but ability to read fluently is not a prerequisite.

Security remains one of the most controversial and contested concepts in international politics. New concepts, such as environmental security and environmental scarcity, have significantly contributed to the new security agenda. Understanding the causes and impacts of global environmental change, and the need to develop effective responses have become major issues of concern for the international community. This course introduces students to the debates that continue to animate the realm of international security studies and environmental politics. By reviewing trends in the scholarship on the environment and security, the course addresses some of the conceptual and contemporary issues relating to the impacts and effects of the environment on international, regional and national security, and the potential for social and political conflict in the Middle East and beyond. Topics of interest include resource wars and energy security, food security, climate change and migration.

Since 1900, the Middle East has been one of the most revolutionary regions of the world. This course will explore the drivers, dynamics, and patterns of these revolutions. It will introduce students to some of the main questions related to revolutions: why do they occur? Why do they succeed? What types of change do they bring about? How do they differ in nature and form? In exploring these questions, we will consider revolutions from different eras and regions, including the constitutional revolutions of the early 20th century, the independence and social revolutions of the mid-20th century, and the democratic revolutions of 2011 that came to be known as the Arab Spring. We will also hone in on certain especially well-studied cases, like the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Egyptian revolution of 2011, considering different perspectives and approaches to analyzing these cases. And we will engage with pioneering works of revolution theory, exploring the extent to which these theories can help us to make sense of these different revolutionary waves. Finally, students will each become experts on their own case of revolution, which will be the topic of a final research paper and also the basis for various mid-semester assignments in which we apply various concepts and theories from course readings.

Nothing about climate change is apolitical. While its origins lie in long-term carbon emissions, the impacts show how climate change’s most devastating human effects are a function of political choices. Conventional climate security narratives typically posit that increased climate change will encourage human migration from vulnerable areas of the world to the Global North, increasing conflict and insecurity everywhere. Critical-security stances are essential in those debates as they outline the structural inequalities of power and distribution of resources while also considering the role of class, states and economic systems as providers of insecurity. An exclusive focus on the relation between climate and conflict obfuscates other important, empirical drivers of conflict, including historical legacies of colonialism, the nexus between climate security and capitalism, policies regarding food, water, and land; property rights regimes; and repressive, authoritarian systems. This advanced graduate class invites students to rethink climate security from the perspective of human security and critical perspectives from the fields of environmental history, post-colonial studies, development and environmental justice. Some of the security implications under consideration will include climate change in the context of armed conflict and settler-colonialism, new forms of Green Colonialism, the Capitalocene, food and health security, climate displacement/migration and racialized borders. The main focus will be on the Middle East and North Africa, with examples drawn from Europe and Africa.

The MAAS Thesis Workshop course is conducted as a writing seminar in which MA in Arab Studies students workshop drafts of their theses, which are based on field research and other primary and secondary sources. Registration requires completion of a research methods course and approval from the MAAS Director of Graduate Studies.

Research, reading, or internship tutorial available by special arrangement and with permission of the instructor.