Wendy Pearlman
Biographic Data
| ID | 79987 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wendy Pearlman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wendy |
| FAMILY NAME | Pearlman |
| SIGNATURE | PEARLMAN W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0141-4569 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 942 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
From ‘Refugee Crisis’ to ‘Integration’ to ‘Return’? Conceptual Lenses in the Study of Syrian Displacement and Diasporisation
Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings: Mapping Interactions between Regimes and Protesters
This book brings together a roster of prominent contributors to present a strategic interactionist perspective on the study of contentious politics in the Middle East in response to the Arab uprisings. The common thread among the contributions is an interest in the micro-level interactions between various strategic players, including not only the mobilisation of protestors during the uprisings but also the responses of regimes. The book also exam…
Why Syria's Civil Society is the Key
Syria's best asset for an inclusive, transparent, and participatory political transition is its civil society. During years of uprising and war, citizens built diverse initiatives to achieve political change, raise awareness, pursue justice, and provide humanitarian relief. Today, organizations inside and outside the country have the capacity, experience, and will to push for democracy. They are already doing so by mobilizing pressure to demand a…
Genocide in Syria, Gaza, and Beyond: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian intellectual, dissident, and the author of nine books, including The Impossible Revolution Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (London: Hurst Publishers, 2017). Arres
Note from Editors
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How Homeland Experiences Shape Refugee Belonging: Rethinking Exile, Home, and Integration in the Syrian Case
Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries. To explore this argument, the article develops a framework …
Note from Editors
Political scientists are tasked with a deeply meaningful and consequential responsibility: explaining the political world. This encompasses a wide array of phenomena, from the behavior of presidents, voters, rebels, and bureaucrats to the origins, transformation, and demise of institutions, regimes, and wars across history and the world. Moreover, our discipline delves into profound normative questions surrounding domination, freedom, equality, r…
Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants' Emotions
Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions' larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term "ethnographic sensibility" to conceptualize an "emotional sensibility" that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sens…
Putting Palestinian Agency First
While some political science scholarship and commentary on Palestinian politics engages Palestinian society as a topic of empirical scrutiny and theoretical significance, much of it either ignores society-level actors and dynamics or regards them as superfluous. Accordingly, society factors into the political story to the degree that it absorbs Israeli policies, is manipulated by self-interested factions, or is pushed to extremism by repression o…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Mobilizing From Scratch: Large-Scale Collective Action Without Preexisting Organization in the Syrian Uprising
Core social movement research argues that large-scale challenges to authority build upon preexisting organization and civil society resources. How do dissenters mobilize masses in repressive settings where, given curtailment of civil society, autonomous associations scarcely exist and norms discourage trust more than encourage it? Testimonials from the Syrian uprising illustrate how protest can become widespread under such conditions, yet occurs …
What makes the "refugee crisis" a crisis? Displaced Syrians' reflections on dignity
In discussions about the connection between migration and the Arab uprisings, perhaps no expression has been more commonplace than "refugee crisis." Commentators have typically invoked this term to refer to Europe's struggle with large numbers of refugees and migrants reaching European borders since 2015. They sometimes also invoke it with reference to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where the overwhelming majority of the region's …
Syrian Views on Obama's Red Line: The Ethical Case for Strikes against Assad
Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphol…
Host State Engagement, Socioeconomic Class, and Syrian Refugees in Turkey and Germany
Refugees' preflight class interacts with host state policies to shape refugees' postdisplacement class trajectories. This interaction affects whether refugees of different backgrounds experience mobility over time and how refugees of various backgrounds disperse over space. "Selective engagement" hosts that leave refugees to self-settle accentuate stratification insofar as refugees with capital can attain entrepreneurial success, poor refugees la…
Becoming a Refugee: Reflections on Self-Understandings of Displacement from the Syrian Case
International law, government policy, and a range of academic disciplines all demonstrate different approaches to the task of defining who is a refugee. Yet how do refugees define themselves? When, how, and why do they come to identify with this term, or not? This essay offers reflections on these questions based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians in the Middle East and Europe from 2012 to 2018. Syrian experiences illustrate how ind…
Moral Identity and Protest Cascades in Syria
Cascade models explain the roles of the intrepid few who initiate protest and the masses who join when the expected utility of dissent flips from negative to positive. Yet questions remain about what motivates participation between those points on the causal chain, or under any conditions of high risk. To explain these anomalies, this article employs theories of moral identity to explore the interdependence of a facet of decision making that rati…
Memory as a Field Site: Interviewing Displaced Persons
Six and a half years after the start of the Arab uprisings, the initial euphoria of popular mobilization and optimism in revolutionary change is an increasingly distant memory. While a few countries in the region are moving in the direction of greater openness, most are gripped by a resurgent authoritarianism that is ever more repressive. Some states are collapsing amid mass violence and humanitarian catastrophe. In others, threat of brutal punis…
Culture or Bureaucracy? Challenges in Syrian Refugees’ Initial Settlement in Germany
In 2015 and 2016, Germany received more than 1.1 million asylum applications, some 425,000 of them from Syrians. Significant optimism accompanied the peak of this refugee inflow, with many Syrians praising Germany as a haven offering freedom and dignity, and many Germans taking pride in their country’s humanitarian stance and welcoming culture. Since then, various sources of anxiety have emerged, particularly those related to locals’ concerns abo…
Mobilization in Military-Controlled Transitions: Lessons from Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt
How, and under what circumstances, does popular mobilization democratize military rule? Democratization does not always involve grassroots protest, but it is important to understand its role when it does. The authors make two propositions. First, mobilization can aid transitions, and forestall military tutelage regimes, by generating popular demands for democratization, altering politicians' incentives and capacities to push for democracy, and es…
Narratives of Fear in Syria
Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers' difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive …
From Palestine to Syria: Three Intifadas and Lessons for Popular Struggles
What lessons can the Palestinian national movement offer contemporary revolts in the Middle East in general, and Syria, specifically? Though the Syrian revolt to overthrow dictatorship is distinct from Palestinians’ mobilization against occupation, many issues and patterns link them as popular struggles. Looking for such patterns, this essay examines three major uprisings in Palestinian history: the Great Revolt of 1936–39, the first Intifada beg…
Puzzles, Time, and Ethnographic Sensibilities: Research Methods after the Arab Spring
Parallel transformations in both the post-Arab spring Middle East and the publishing world present tests for scholars of the region. This essay suggests three strategies for reframing challenges as opportunities and reconceptualizing the seeming liabilities of academic work as resources. First, I propose that the surprising character of recent upheavals ought not demoralize scholarly inquiry but rather invigorate it by showcasing the kinds of dif…
Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State
Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation-state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way tha…
Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings
In any political setting, a few people will defy political authority. The main challenge for theories of rebellion is to explain when and why others join en masse. Scholarship on social movements typically develops answers to this puzzle on the basis of either of two microfoundations. Explanations that conceptualize individuals as utility-maximizers contend that they protest as a means to other ends. Explanations that see individuals as driven by…
Emigration and Power: A Study of Sects in Lebanon, 1860-2010
How does emigration affect access to and struggles for power in sending states? For competing groups in the homeland, emigration presents a contradiction: demographic losses but possible economic gains. Wins and losses from this trade-off evolve with shifts in who migrates, to where, and when. I illustrate these relationships in the case of Lebanon since 1860, focusing on the balance of power among sectarian communities. The country's first migra…
Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings
In any political setting, a few people will defy political authority. The main challenge for theories of rebellion is to explain when and why others join en masse. Scholarship on social movements typically develops answers to this puzzle on the basis of either of two microfoundations. Explanations that conceptualize individuals as utility-maximizers contend that they protest as a means to other ends. Explanations that see individuals as driven by…
Shirts Today, Skins Tomorrow: Dual Contests and the Effects of Fragmentation in Self-Determination Disputes
While theoretical models of conflict often treat actors as unitary, most self-determination groups are fragmented into a number of competing internal factions. This article presents a framework for understanding the “dual contests” that self-determination groups engage in—the first with their host state and the second between co-ethnic factions within groups. Using a new data set of the number of factions within a sample of self-determination gro…
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Insurgent Fratricide, Ethnic Defection, and the Rise of Pro-State Paramilitaries
Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of "fratricidal flipping" that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping…
Nonstate Actors, Fragmentation, and Conflict Processes
Narratives of Fear in Syria
Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers' difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive …
Out-Group Conflict, In-Group Unity: Exploring the Effect of Repression on Intramovement Cooperation
Does repression increase or decrease unity within ethnic or nationalist movements? Conventional wisdom lends itself to two contradictory predictions. On one hand, it is said that conflict with an out-group is the surest path to unity in an in-group. On the other hand, repression exaggerates the gap between radicals and moderates in a movement. Challenging both views, this article argues that repression amplifies trends in cooperation or conflict …
Spoiling Inside and Out: Internal Political Contestation and the Middle East Peace Process
Actors turn to negotiating or spoiling as a means of contesting not only what a proposed peace settlement entails but also who has the power to decide the terms. Conflicts are more likely to witness negotiating and spoiling for purposes of internal contestation to the degree that one or both of the warring parties lack an institutionalized system of legitimate representation. Whether internal contestation leads a group to act as a peace maker or …
Commitment Problems or Bidding Wars? Rebel Fragmentation as Peace Building
After highly fragmented civil wars, order is often secured through the selective co-optation of rebel field commanders and atomized insurgents. This paper presents a formal model of civil war settlement as a coalition formation game between various regime and rebel factions. This approach emphasizes the ability of installed civilian rulers to lure warlords into the state based on promises of future wealth, then use divide-and-rule tactics to pit …
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Why Split? Organizational Splits among Ethnopolitical Organizations in the Middle East
Why do political organizations split? Drawing insight from organizational theory and social movement literature, this article explores the effect of organizational factors on group schism. Using a new data set of 112 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East, the article examines to what extent organizational factors such as leadership structure, organizational legality, and tactical intensity, as well as contextual variables such as state …
Moral Identity and Protest Cascades in Syria
Cascade models explain the roles of the intrepid few who initiate protest and the masses who join when the expected utility of dissent flips from negative to positive. Yet questions remain about what motivates participation between those points on the causal chain, or under any conditions of high risk. To explain these anomalies, this article employs theories of moral identity to explore the interdependence of a facet of decision making that rati…
Mobilizing From Scratch: Large-Scale Collective Action Without Preexisting Organization in the Syrian Uprising
Core social movement research argues that large-scale challenges to authority build upon preexisting organization and civil society resources. How do dissenters mobilize masses in repressive settings where, given curtailment of civil society, autonomous associations scarcely exist and norms discourage trust more than encourage it? Testimonials from the Syrian uprising illustrate how protest can become widespread under such conditions, yet occurs …
Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants' Emotions
Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions' larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term "ethnographic sensibility" to conceptualize an "emotional sensibility" that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sens…
Host State Engagement, Socioeconomic Class, and Syrian Refugees in Turkey and Germany
Refugees' preflight class interacts with host state policies to shape refugees' postdisplacement class trajectories. This interaction affects whether refugees of different backgrounds experience mobility over time and how refugees of various backgrounds disperse over space. "Selective engagement" hosts that leave refugees to self-settle accentuate stratification insofar as refugees with capital can attain entrepreneurial success, poor refugees la…
Culture or Bureaucracy? Challenges in Syrian Refugees’ Initial Settlement in Germany
In 2015 and 2016, Germany received more than 1.1 million asylum applications, some 425,000 of them from Syrians. Significant optimism accompanied the peak of this refugee inflow, with many Syrians praising Germany as a haven offering freedom and dignity, and many Germans taking pride in their country’s humanitarian stance and welcoming culture. Since then, various sources of anxiety have emerged, particularly those related to locals’ concerns abo…
Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State
Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation-state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way tha…
Emigration and Power: A Study of Sects in Lebanon, 1860-2010
How does emigration affect access to and struggles for power in sending states? For competing groups in the homeland, emigration presents a contradiction: demographic losses but possible economic gains. Wins and losses from this trade-off evolve with shifts in who migrates, to where, and when. I illustrate these relationships in the case of Lebanon since 1860, focusing on the balance of power among sectarian communities. The country's first migra…
Precluding Nonviolence, Propelling Violence: The Effect of Internal Fragmentation on Movement Protest
Mobilization in Military-Controlled Transitions: Lessons from Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt
How, and under what circumstances, does popular mobilization democratize military rule? Democratization does not always involve grassroots protest, but it is important to understand its role when it does. The authors make two propositions. First, mobilization can aid transitions, and forestall military tutelage regimes, by generating popular demands for democratization, altering politicians' incentives and capacities to push for democracy, and es…
How Homeland Experiences Shape Refugee Belonging: Rethinking Exile, Home, and Integration in the Syrian Case
Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries. To explore this argument, the article develops a framework …
Struggle in a Post-Charisma Transition: Rethinking Palestinian Politics after Arafat
Drawing on Max Weber's three kinds of legitimate domination, this article proposes the concept of ““post-charisma transition”” to describe the transformation of a political system in which authority is legitimated by a leader's personal stature. As illustrated by recent Palestinian politics, such a transition may result in attempts at institution-building when a successor to a charismatic leader bolsters legal forms in order to derive authority t…
Triadic Deterrence: Coercing Strength, Beaten by Weakness
Triadic deterrence is the situation when one state uses threats and/or punishments against another state to coerce it to prevent non-state actors from conducting attacks from its territory. Under what conditions is triadic deterrence successful? Some attribute outcomes to the balance of power between states. By contrast, we argue that the complex asymmetrical structure of this conflict requires attention to the targeted regime's relationship to i…
What makes the "refugee crisis" a crisis? Displaced Syrians' reflections on dignity
In discussions about the connection between migration and the Arab uprisings, perhaps no expression has been more commonplace than "refugee crisis." Commentators have typically invoked this term to refer to Europe's struggle with large numbers of refugees and migrants reaching European borders since 2015. They sometimes also invoke it with reference to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where the overwhelming majority of the region's …
Memory as a Field Site: Interviewing Displaced Persons
Six and a half years after the start of the Arab uprisings, the initial euphoria of popular mobilization and optimism in revolutionary change is an increasingly distant memory. While a few countries in the region are moving in the direction of greater openness, most are gripped by a resurgent authoritarianism that is ever more repressive. Some states are collapsing amid mass violence and humanitarian catastrophe. In others, threat of brutal punis…
Puzzles, Time, and Ethnographic Sensibilities: Research Methods after the Arab Spring
Parallel transformations in both the post-Arab spring Middle East and the publishing world present tests for scholars of the region. This essay suggests three strategies for reframing challenges as opportunities and reconceptualizing the seeming liabilities of academic work as resources. First, I propose that the surprising character of recent upheavals ought not demoralize scholarly inquiry but rather invigorate it by showcasing the kinds of dif…
Struggle in a Post-Charisma Transition: Rethinking Palestinian Politics after Arafat
Drawing on Max Weber's three kinds of legitimate domination, this article proposes the concept of ““post-charisma transition”” to describe the transformation of a political system in which authority is legitimated by a leader's personal stature. As illustrated by recent Palestinian politics, such a transition may result in attempts at institution-building when a successor to a charismatic leader bolsters legal forms in order to derive authority t…
Spoiling Inside and Out: Internal Political Contestation and the Middle East Peace Process
Actors turn to negotiating or spoiling as a means of contesting not only what a proposed peace settlement entails but also who has the power to decide the terms. Conflicts are more likely to witness negotiating and spoiling for purposes of internal contestation to the degree that one or both of the warring parties lack an institutionalized system of legitimate representation. Whether internal contestation leads a group to act as a peace maker or …
Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals thes…
Out-Group Conflict, In-Group Unity: Exploring the Effect of Repression on Intramovement Cooperation
Does repression increase or decrease unity within ethnic or nationalist movements? Conventional wisdom lends itself to two contradictory predictions. On one hand, it is said that conflict with an out-group is the surest path to unity in an in-group. On the other hand, repression exaggerates the gap between radicals and moderates in a movement. Challenging both views, this article argues that repression amplifies trends in cooperation or conflict …
The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences
The June 1967 war was a watershed in the history of the modern Middle East. In six days, the Israelis defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, seizing large portions of their territories. Two veteran scholars of the Middle East bring together some of the most knowledgeable experts in their fields to reassess the origins and the legacies of the war. Each chapter takes a different perspective from the vantage point of a different partici…
Response to Sharon Erickson Nepstad's review of Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement
Sharon Erickson Nepstad's thoughtful review makes important points. I am gratified by what she describes as my contributions, and no less appreciative of her discussion of areas in which a stronger contribution might have been made. Many of these are questions that my book raises and that I hope future research will investigate
Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century . By Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century . By Sharon Erickson Nepstad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 200p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. We live in nonviolent revolutionary times. From Egypt to Moscow, New York to Manama, 2011 saw millions of peaceful protestors take to the streets to demand change. Under what conditions do civilian-based struggles achieve their goals without resort to violence
Precluding Nonviolence, Propelling Violence: The Effect of Internal Fragmentation on Movement Protest
Commitment Problems or Bidding Wars? Rebel Fragmentation as Peace Building
After highly fragmented civil wars, order is often secured through the selective co-optation of rebel field commanders and atomized insurgents. This paper presents a formal model of civil war settlement as a coalition formation game between various regime and rebel factions. This approach emphasizes the ability of installed civilian rulers to lure warlords into the state based on promises of future wealth, then use divide-and-rule tactics to pit …
Why Split? Organizational Splits among Ethnopolitical Organizations in the Middle East
Why do political organizations split? Drawing insight from organizational theory and social movement literature, this article explores the effect of organizational factors on group schism. Using a new data set of 112 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East, the article examines to what extent organizational factors such as leadership structure, organizational legality, and tactical intensity, as well as contextual variables such as state …
Nonstate Actors, Fragmentation, and Conflict Processes
Shirts Today, Skins Tomorrow: Dual Contests and the Effects of Fragmentation in Self-Determination Disputes
While theoretical models of conflict often treat actors as unitary, most self-determination groups are fragmented into a number of competing internal factions. This article presents a framework for understanding the “dual contests” that self-determination groups engage in—the first with their host state and the second between co-ethnic factions within groups. Using a new data set of the number of factions within a sample of self-determination gro…
Triadic Deterrence: Coercing Strength, Beaten by Weakness
Triadic deterrence is the situation when one state uses threats and/or punishments against another state to coerce it to prevent non-state actors from conducting attacks from its territory. Under what conditions is triadic deterrence successful? Some attribute outcomes to the balance of power between states. By contrast, we argue that the complex asymmetrical structure of this conflict requires attention to the targeted regime's relationship to i…
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Insurgent Fratricide, Ethnic Defection, and the Rise of Pro-State Paramilitaries
Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of "fratricidal flipping" that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping…
Security and Suspicion: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel. by Juliana Ochs
Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings
In any political setting, a few people will defy political authority. The main challenge for theories of rebellion is to explain when and why others join en masse. Scholarship on social movements typically develops answers to this puzzle on the basis of either of two microfoundations. Explanations that conceptualize individuals as utility-maximizers contend that they protest as a means to other ends. Explanations that see individuals as driven by…
Emigration and Power: A Study of Sects in Lebanon, 1860-2010
How does emigration affect access to and struggles for power in sending states? For competing groups in the homeland, emigration presents a contradiction: demographic losses but possible economic gains. Wins and losses from this trade-off evolve with shifts in who migrates, to where, and when. I illustrate these relationships in the case of Lebanon since 1860, focusing on the balance of power among sectarian communities. The country's first migra…
Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State
Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation-state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way tha…
Puzzles, Time, and Ethnographic Sensibilities: Research Methods after the Arab Spring
Parallel transformations in both the post-Arab spring Middle East and the publishing world present tests for scholars of the region. This essay suggests three strategies for reframing challenges as opportunities and reconceptualizing the seeming liabilities of academic work as resources. First, I propose that the surprising character of recent upheavals ought not demoralize scholarly inquiry but rather invigorate it by showcasing the kinds of dif…
Narratives of Fear in Syria
Scholarship on Syria has traditionally been limited by researchers' difficulty in accessing the reflections of ordinary citizens due to their reluctance to speak about politics. The 2011 revolt opened exciting opportunities by producing an outpouring of new forms of self-expression, as well as encouraging millions to tell their stories for the first time. I explore what we can learn from greater attention to such data, based on thick descriptive …
From Palestine to Syria: Three Intifadas and Lessons for Popular Struggles
What lessons can the Palestinian national movement offer contemporary revolts in the Middle East in general, and Syria, specifically? Though the Syrian revolt to overthrow dictatorship is distinct from Palestinians’ mobilization against occupation, many issues and patterns link them as popular struggles. Looking for such patterns, this essay examines three major uprisings in Palestinian history: the Great Revolt of 1936–39, the first Intifada beg…
Memory as a Field Site: Interviewing Displaced Persons
Six and a half years after the start of the Arab uprisings, the initial euphoria of popular mobilization and optimism in revolutionary change is an increasingly distant memory. While a few countries in the region are moving in the direction of greater openness, most are gripped by a resurgent authoritarianism that is ever more repressive. Some states are collapsing amid mass violence and humanitarian catastrophe. In others, threat of brutal punis…
Culture or Bureaucracy? Challenges in Syrian Refugees’ Initial Settlement in Germany
In 2015 and 2016, Germany received more than 1.1 million asylum applications, some 425,000 of them from Syrians. Significant optimism accompanied the peak of this refugee inflow, with many Syrians praising Germany as a haven offering freedom and dignity, and many Germans taking pride in their country’s humanitarian stance and welcoming culture. Since then, various sources of anxiety have emerged, particularly those related to locals’ concerns abo…
Mobilization in Military-Controlled Transitions: Lessons from Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt
How, and under what circumstances, does popular mobilization democratize military rule? Democratization does not always involve grassroots protest, but it is important to understand its role when it does. The authors make two propositions. First, mobilization can aid transitions, and forestall military tutelage regimes, by generating popular demands for democratization, altering politicians' incentives and capacities to push for democracy, and es…
Becoming a Refugee: Reflections on Self-Understandings of Displacement from the Syrian Case
International law, government policy, and a range of academic disciplines all demonstrate different approaches to the task of defining who is a refugee. Yet how do refugees define themselves? When, how, and why do they come to identify with this term, or not? This essay offers reflections on these questions based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians in the Middle East and Europe from 2012 to 2018. Syrian experiences illustrate how ind…
Political science (35 works) · Law (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (22 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (12 works)