POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

Laleh Khalili talks about her latest book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant for the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.   Khalili explains, “Whenever you look at the list of the Journal of Commerce’s top 10 container ports in the world, t...

Marc Lynch speaks with Marwa Shalaby of Rice University about the status of women in politics in the Middle East.

Catherine Herrold talks about her latest book, Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book uncovers the strategies that Egyptian NGOs have used to advance the aims of the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “What the book argues is that, in fact, many development NGOs and local grant making foundations did promot...

Fanar Haddad talks about his latest book, Understanding ‘Sectarianism’: Sunni-Shi’a Relations in the Modern Arab World, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification, but as a multi-layered concept. Haddad said, “One of the problems with how sectarianism, the phrase, is approached is that it’s almost always is presented...

Samuel Helfont talks about his latest book, Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book investigates religion and politics in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as well as the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. Helfont said, “I found that there was prolif...

Sara Pursley talks about her latest book, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about the role of gender and family reform projects in Iraq, two ideas of modernization and economic development, from the 1920s to the first Ba'ath coup in 1963. Pursley said, “For the 1950s, the discourses were really different. They were really...

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen talks about his latest book, Qatar and the Gulf Crisis: A Study of Resilience, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In his book, Coates Ulrichsen offers an authoritative study on the Qatari leadership and population’s response to the 2017 economic blockade from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt. Coates Ulrichsen said, “I wanted to look at how Qatar had responded...

Noah Salomon talks about his latest book, For the Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst. “So the book really set out to explain something that I felt hadn't been touched on in the li...

Steven Brooke talks about his latest book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. Through an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. “One of the kind...

Salwa Ismail talks about her latest book, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book demonstrates how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities and structuring their interactions with the regime and with one another. “The main quest...

Ceren Lord talks about her latest book, Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about how Islamist mobilization in Turkey has been facilitated from within the state by institutions established during early nation-building. “I believe my book offers a corrective to some of the established common wisdoms that look a...

Omar Dewachi talks about his latest book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book presents the history of healthcare in Iraq, the rise and fall of Iraqi medicine, and the role of healthcare in the making and unmaking of the infrastructure of the state. Dewachi explains, “For four decades the state [of Iraq] invested in training...

Is American global hegemony already over? On this week’s podcast, Daniel Nexon talks about his latest book, co-authored with Alexander Cooley, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order, with Marc Lynch. The book explores pathways in which hegemonic orders come apart—short of great power war—and the kinds of processes that are playing out in shaping global politics today. “The...

How did the Persian Gulf states' energy use and policies change with the discovery of oil? That is what Jim Krane tackles in his latest book, Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf, which he discusses on this week's podcast with Marc Lynch. Energy Kingdom traces the history of the Gulf states’ energy use and policies, looking in particular at how energy subsidies have dist...

Thomas Hegghammer speaks about his new book, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad, with Marc Lynch. Hegghammer explains how prominent Palestinian cleric Abdallah Azzam—who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s— came to play such an influential role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. "There were militant Islamist groups in the 50s,...

On this week's podcast, Mark C. Thompson talks about his new book, Being Young, Male and Saudi: Identity and Politics in a Globalized Kingdom, with Marc Lynch. "The main goal of this book was to give a voice to a very wide variety of young Saudi men across the Kingdom— about how they feel about living in today's contemporary Saudi Arabia, their aspirations and concerns," said Thompson. "Outside of...

Wolfram Lacher talks about his new book, Libya's Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. "The book really started with the observation that what has marked Libya's political and military landscape since 2011 is localism," said Lacher. "What I very quickly saw when I looked at this phenomenon of local forces was that we're not really talking...

Yael Zeira talks about her new book The Revolution Within State Institutions and Unarmed Resistance in Palestine with Marc Lynch. Her book examines who engages in resistance activities through an in-depth study of unarmed resistance against Israeli rule in the Palestinian Territories over more than a decade. "The main question that inspired me to write this book is: 'Why do some people participate...

On this week's podcast, Jonathan Fulton talks about his book China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies with Marc Lynch. "It's interesting because a lot of the narrative about China-Gulf relations seemed to be stuck in this oil-for-trade narrative— that China is buying a lot of oil and selling a lot of stuff— and that's kind of the extent of the relationship. And from what I've seen here in Abu Dh...

Simon Mabon speaks about his new book, Houses Built on Sand: Violence, Sectarianism and Revolution in the Middle East, with Marc Lynch on this week's podcast. "I was trying to understand one way the Arab uprisings played out— in particular, the ways across the region," said Mabon. "What I've done instead is to look at how the relationship between 'rulers and ruled' has evolved across the region ac...

This week's podcast is a conversation with Aaron Y. Zelin who discusses his new book, Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad. In the book, Zelin explains how Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State— even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little his...

On this week's POMEPS podcast, May Darwich discusses her new book, Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region, with Marc Lynch. "The book focuses on how threat perceptions for some states led to particular alliance decisions," said Darwich. "It looks at some historical cases ,but also some more recent cases." "In particular, it's looking at how identi...

Launching our new season of the POMEPS Conversations podcast, Narges Bajoghli discusses her book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic.  In this book, Bajoghli provides an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. Dr. Narges Bajoghli is an award-winning anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work focus...

Shiraz Maher speaks with Marc Lynch about his new book, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea. In the book, he explores the intellectual trajectory of Salafi-Jihadism from its origins in the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the jihadist insurgencies of the 1990s and the 9/11 wars. “I wanted to chart the intellectual migration of this movement with reference to Islamic theology and to try to bring...

Ariel I. Ahram speaks with Marc Lynch about his new book, Break all the Borders: Separatism and the Reshaping of the Middle East. In Break all the Borders, Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake the borders of the Arab world and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern...