The published literature on the topic of “Authoritarianism, Civil Society, and Democracy in the Middle East” is extensive and unwieldy. Partly due to space constraints, we propose to review the topic under six framing questions and then provide a selected and representative bibliography at the end.

The ideas of political reform and democracy are often the mainstay of debates within Middle Eastern polities. In general, there is ample awareness of democracy deficit and poor governance in the region. Democracy refers most basically to the ability of citizens to hold their governments accountable, and to change their political leaders at regular intervals. Instead, accountability to the public is generally weak in the region, and rulers are more likely to change as a result of actuarial realities than a withdrawal of public confidence.

Arabic instruction in Israeli government schools in the Jewish sector is unsatisfactory by both subjective and objective measures. The general consensus among educators, academics and other interested parties, most notably the security apparatus—the main employer of Jews with knowledge of Arabic—is that not enough students study Arabic, and that those who do fail to achieve proficiency in the language (Uhlmann 2010, Ben-Rafael and Brosh 1991, Spolsky and Shohamy 1991, Spolsky et al. 1995, Lustigman 2008, State Comptroller 1996:367). Dissatisfaction with Arabic instruction has been an integral feature of the field since the very inception of the modern, secular, public Hebrew school system in the days of the British Mandate over Palestine (see especially early papers in Yonai 1992 and Landau 1961). This enduring educational fecklessness is remarkable given the available resources and the powerful stakeholders that drive for deepening and broadening Arabic instruction in Jewish schools.

Previous analyses of the problems of Arabic instruction have focused on language ideology and Jewish pupils’ attitudes towards Arabic and Arabs (e.g. Ben-Rafael & Brosh 1991, Ben-Rafael 1994, Kraemer and Olshtain 1994, cf. the comprehensive overview by Spolsky et al. 1995). However, language ideology is but one aspect of the broad political and institutional structuring of Arabic instruction in Israel, and it is this complex as a whole that is responsible for the state of Arabic instruction.

The Ottoman Empire, contrary to the stereotype, was a key player in global commerce until well into the nineteenth century. Customs registers (gümrük defterleri) compiled by the Ottoman administration provide abundant information on ships, seamen, merchants, goods, and prices. This article summarizes the history of Ottoman customs taxation, enumerates the various types of records that contain information on trade and customs dues, and surveys current scholarship on the customs registers. It also includes lists of customs registers found in the Maliyeden Müdevver collection of the Prime Minister's Ottoman Archive (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) and other collections also containing customs registers and related documents. The purpose is to stimulate further research into the Ottoman Empire's role in global interaction and exchange, a core topic in the growing field of world history.

To deal with the growing migrant crisis in North Africa, several states have considered granting amnesty to foreign displaced persons (both economic migrants and potential refugees) who have entered their territories clandestinely. Morocco has taken the lead in this policy approach, launching two successful amnesty campaigns in 2014 and 2017 that regularized the status of approximately 40,000 displaced persons in total. While policymakers in many North African states increasingly see this policy as a viable solution, it is less understood how ordinary citizens view such regularization policies. Hence, this article inquires: under what conditions do ordinary native citizens support regularizing clandestine migrants and refugees? Further, what factors correlate with either higher or lower levels of public support for (or opposition to) regularization campaigns? Drawing on an original representative public opinion poll from Morocco's Casablanca-Settat region completed in 2017, this article finds that more than 59 percent of native citizens of Morocco support these regularization campaigns. Particularly, Moroccans who were wealthier, female, and ethnic minorities (black Moroccans) endorsed regularization more strongly. By contrast, Moroccans opposed regularization when they had concerns about whether displaced persons hurt the economy, undermine cultural traditions, and reduce stability.

The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a neglected and misrepresented field, and to open up institutional spaces for discussion, research and study. We seek to connect artists, scholars and others from around the world by sponsoring conferences, holding meetings, and exchanging information via a newsletter and website.

Current debates about the status of middle east studies are informed by an assumption that separates ‘area studies’ from ‘global studies,’ and ‘area specialization’ from disciplinary or theoretical orientation. Arguing against such separation, I propose that a resort to comparative perspectives may help bridge the divide. To this end, I discuss imperatives and modalities of thinking comparatively in the context of the Middle East, and their implications for bringing other areas into comparative inquiries. Focusing on illustrations from Middle East social studies, I attempt to think through my own, albeit limited, experience of comparative research within the Middle East region.

As a colleague of mine has recently written, a term that was slanderous a mere decade ago—empire—has now become a cliché in discussing the United States. Indeed,

From time to time in recent years, the complaint has been voiced that “women’s studies” have gone far enough: panels on women at professional meetings are de rigeur. though the subject matter is becoming somewhat tedious; articles and books on women are proliferating, though they seem to be increasingly repetitive; and furthermore, it is argued, there is nothing intrinsically interesting or problematic about women per se. As for investigators whose interest focus on women in the Middle East, they have been called opportunistic, capitalizing on the feminist movement in the United States, and have been accused of imposing feminist concerns and sensibilities on Middle Eastern societies.

One problem faced by many Western historians of the Middle East and North Africa is a relative ignorance of what is being produced by the local scholars themselves. In the case of the Maghreb, for example, without regular visits to the area, an American researcher may have to wait several years to learn about the publication of a new book or a local research project relevant to his own interests. This observation is certainly true for Tunisia, where a small, active group of historians at the University of Tunis has been examining aspects of Tunisia's political and social evolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose works, with few exceptions, are not well known to scholars in America.

In 1957 and 1958, Lebanese Armenian political parties, through the medium of their newspapers, rearranged the Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hamoud and Corniche al-Nahr as Armenian territories, separate from, and often in opposition to, the Lebanese state. These Armenian parties, in vying with one another for authority over this territory, fashioned Armenian enemies of one another. The internal Armenian enemy of the Armenian nation was constructed from within the national space of Lebanon. The power struggle within the Armenian community in Lebanon challenges the placement of Armenians in the historiography of Lebanon, which considers them as refugees and therefore non-Lebanese or temporary residents of Lebanon as well as passive, impossible political actors.