Results by title

Women’s transgressive behaviors and perspectives are challenging societal norms in the Arab world, giving rise to anxiety and public debate. Simultaneously, however, other Arab women are unwillingly finding themselves labeled “bad” as authority figures attempt to redirect scrutiny from serious social ills such as patriarchy and economic exploitation, or as they impose new restrictions on women’s behavior in response to uncertainty and change in society. Bad Girls of the Arab World elucidates how both intentional and unintentional transgressions make manifest the social and cultural constructs that define proper and improper behavior, as well as the social and political policing of gender, racial, and class divisions.

The works collected here address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which the women themselves reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by the acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women’s transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women’s badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women’s varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.

How Arab states use tourism for their own ends

Despite being viewed as a dangerous region to visit, leisure travel across the Middle East has thrived even in the post–9/11 era. In Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, Waleed Hazbun investigates this overlooked industry to show how tourism is shaping the economic development and international relations of the region in dramatic ways.

The advent of the Arab Spring in late 2010 was a hopeful moment for partisans of progressive change throughout the Arab world. Authoritarian leaders who had long stood in the way of meaningful political reform in the countries of the region were either ousted or faced the possibility of political if not physical demise. The downfall of long-standing dictators as they faced off with strong-willed protesters was a clear sign that democratic change was within reach. Throughout the last ten years, however, the Arab world has witnessed authoritarian regimes regaining resilience, pro-democracy movements losing momentum, and struggles between the first and the latter involving regional and international powers.
     This volume explains how relevant political players in Arab countries among regimes, opposition movements, and external actors have adapted ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring. It includes contributions on Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. It also features studies on the respective roles of the United States, China, Iran, and Turkey vis-à-vis questions of political change and stability in the Arab region, and includes a study analyzing the role of Saudi Arabia and its allies in subverting revolutionary movements in other countries.

Since November 8, 1942, when American troops in Operation Torch first landed on the beaches of North Africa, almost a million Americans—military personnel and their dependents—have lived in Morocco. Their impact on the political and social evolution of Morocco has been significant, but historians and political scientists before this book had made little effort to chart its course or to assess its outcome.

The naval base at Port Lyautey in Morocco was the first foreign base captured by American troops in World War II, and United States objectives in Morocco continued to be primarily military. In 1942, as the price for French support against the Axis, the United States pledged its support for the restoration of the prewar French colonial empire. In 1950, faced with the threat of Soviet aggression, the United States negotiated an agreement with France and built four United States Air Force bases in Morocco without consultation with or notification of the Moroccan government.

In spite of its sterile diplomatic policy and both Communist and Moroccan nationalist demands for evacuation of United States military bases, the United States retained essential military facilities in Morocco for many years. Leon Blair concludes that American military personnel and their dependents favorably conditioned Moroccan public opinion. By their egalitarianism, humanitarianism, and evident interest, they reinforced the idealistic image of the United States that was held by the majority of Moroccans.

These Americans were neither individually nor collectively conscious agents in a campaign to modify Moroccan public opinion; they were simply a Western window in the Arab world, through which two civilizations might view one another. In the long run, they made a greater contribution in peace than in war.