Facing the Facts on Tremulous Grounds

One decade after the Arab uprisings of 2010/11, social science research on the social and political dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa is facing three major challenges: First, the Arab uprisings and their diverging political trajectories have turned fundamental assumptions about Middle East politics and societies into question. Second, these social and political developments emanating from the Arab uprisings and their aftermath have had a considerable impact on doing research in the region south and east of the Mediterranean. This is also being addressed in the AGYA publication ‘Academia in Transformation‘ edited by AGYA members Sarhan Dhouib, Fatima Kastner, Florian Kohstall and Carola Richter. Finally, how do we make sense of the recent wave of protests that have shaken the region during 2019? The planned special issue, edited by Jan Busse and André Bank, intends to address the specific problems which context-sensitive knowledge production on the Middle East is encountering on both a theoretical and an empirical, practical level. As a result, the articles in the special issue will address the aforementioned three challenges in order to make a profound contribution to the interrelationship between social science theorizing and empirical research on the Middle East in the face of a turbulent and changing academic and regional environment. The following contributors and discussants will participate in the workshop: Nadine Abdallah (American University of Cairo), May Darwich (Durham University), Mirjam Edel (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Sari Hanafi (American University Beirut), Maria Josua (GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies), Dietrich Jung (University of Southern Denmark), Marc Lynch (George Washington University), Nadine Sika (American University of Cairo), Stephan Stetter (Bundeswehr University Munich), Andrea Teti (University of Aberdeen), Morten Valbjørn (Aarhus University), Jan Claudius Völkel (University of Freiburg) and Irene Weipert-Fenner (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt). The authors’ workshop is part of a tandem project by AGYA members Jan Busse and Jan Völkel in cooperation with André Bank from the GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies in Hamburg.