Territory, Sovereignty, and New Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel I. Ahram
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
State Building ◽  
Regional Government ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
World War ◽  
Regional System

This article examines the interaction between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the Middle East and North Africa. Various groups have aspired — and have failed — to become states since the contemporary regional system's inception after World War I. Since the 2011 uprisings, movements claiming territory and sovereignty have emerged or become more viable throughout the region, including the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Rojava, Cyrenaica, Azawad, and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Each poses different challenges to the regional system and holds out different hopes for rectifying historical missteps in state-building.

scholarly journals The Kurds in the changing political map of the Middle East

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-81
Author(s):  
Michael M Gunter
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Government ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
World War ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
Turkish Government ◽  
Middle East Politics ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party

This article examines how the rise of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the on-going Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgency and current peace negotiations with the Turkish government, and the recently declared autonomy by the Syrian Kurds—largely under the leadership of the Democratic Union Party (PYD)—have empowered the Kurds and challenged the existing political map of the Middle East largely established after World War I. At the same time this article also considers the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as one of the other main tipping points changing the Middle East political map. The roles and policies of Turkey and the United States to these transformations are also analysed.Keywords: Kurds; ISIS; Middle East; politics; Syria; Iraq; KRG; Turkey.Kurd di xerîteya siyasî ya Rojhilata Navîn a di guherînê deArmanca vê gotarê ew e tehlîl bike ka duristbûna Hukûmeta Herêma Kurdistanê, serhildana berdewam a Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê û danûstandinên aştiyê ligel hukûmeta Tirkiyeyê, û ew otonomiya ku kurdên Sûriyeyê, heyamên dawî, piranî di bin pêşengiya Partiya Yekîtiya Demokratîk de ragihandin çawa kurd bihêz kirine û çawa hevsengiya xerîteya siyasî ya Rojhilata Navîn, ya bi piranî li dû Şerê Cîhanî yê Yekem hatiye binecihkirin, xistiye ber birparsyaran. Gotar herwiha balê dikêşe ser peydabûna Dewleta Îslamî li Iraq û Sûriyeyê wek xaleke dîtir a werçerxanê di guherîna xerîteya siyasî ya Rojhilata Navîn de. Herwiha, dewr û siyasetên Tirkiye û Dewletên Yekgirtî yên Emerîkayê yên di barê van guherînan de jî hatine tehlîlkirin.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-656
Author(s):  
Mustafa Aksakal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Curricula

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Pitfalls of Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa Region

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Ramzi Bendebka
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
State Building ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Regional System ◽  
Political Choices

Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is a fundamental issue. As long as this fundamental issue is not well discussed, any reforms in the regional system, including integration and state building, would be insufficient in alleviating the challenges faced by Arab nations as they attempt unity in the region. Any understanding of how and why MENA states make political choices towards stability and unity, necessitates the understanding of how they view themselves in terms of representing identity. The objective of this study is to investigate the transformation and the changing nationalism in the modern MENA region. For instance, Arab society has courted several ideologies from Arabism or Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic nationalism, among others. Ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the context in which several ideologies interact with each other and affect nationalism in the MENA region. Although Arab nationalism continues to play an ideological role, what is its relation with Islam? Why Arab Islamic nationalism in the MENA region does not unite states or non-state groups like the cases of Iran and the Kurds? It is therefore useful for this article to illustrate firstly, the relation between Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic nationalism, secondly, the case of Iran nationalism and finally, the Kurds and their strive for a separate nationalism.

Dispossession and Displacement

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Developing Area

This book explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The chapters present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as ‘those who remain’, from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. The chapters are grouped around four related themes — displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and refugee policy — providing a significant contribution to this developing area of contemporary research.

scholarly journals Bilad al-Brazil: The Importance of West African Scholars in Brazilian Islamic Education and Practice in Historic and Contemporary Perspective

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Ayodeji Ogunnaike
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Sudan I ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Contemporary Perspective

While it is well established now that the middle passage did not entirely separate Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas from their home cultures and traditions, these connections are often studied and understood in the form of survivals or ancestral memory. This paper argues that in major urban centers in Brazil until around the time of World War I, West Africans not only managed to recreate Islamic communities and intellectual traditions, but maintained important contacts with their homelands. In much the same way that scholars have argued that the Sahara constituted an avenue of exchange and connection between North Africa and Bilad al-Sudan, I argue here that the Atlantic Ocean was not an insurmountable barrier but provided opportunities for African Muslims to extend the traditions of Bilad al-Sudan into Brazil—albeit to a much lesser extent.

The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Le Gall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
North African ◽  
World War ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Colonial

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North Africantarīqa(pl.turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.

The Government of War

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
State System ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
The Government

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

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