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IDCAR Kick-off Conference at the GIGA in Hamburg

12/30/2014

Just before the holidays I was participating at a confernce in my hometown Hamburg. The IDCAR Network kick-off Conference in Hamburg at the German Institute for Global Area Studies (GIGA). The Acronym IDCAR stands for International Diffusion and Cooperation of Authoritarian Regimes. The Network which is sponsored by the Leibniz foundation aims to bring together scholars working on relevant issues with different regional, theoretical and methodological backgrounds in order to foster and institutionalize exchange between them. It wants to lay the ground for further more specific research projects and collaboration between the participants. The participation in the conference was partly coming home to my alma mater as the GIGA is also cooperating with the University of Hamburg, from where I received my undegraduate degree. As an undergaduate student I oftentimes visited the GIGA to work in the library or listen to talks and debates just as the one that started of the IDCAR conference on the first evening. Being back a few years later as a participant was a very nice possibility to meet people that have already known during my studies in Hamburg.

Although the first conference (as Christoph Stefes rightly pointed out during the conference) was dominated by comparativists from political science field the network aims to bring together scholars from International Relations, Area Studies and Comparative Politics to discuss a common research agenda.

some impressions from the first IDCAR conference @ GIGA in Hamburg. Foto copyright lies with the GIGA. Fotos are taken from the IDCAR Twitter account: @idcar_network

Amidst the grey in grey and rainy weather in my hometown Hamburg the conference was overall in high spirits and most of the participants seemed to be looking forward to further exchange of the network. It was interesting to hear that other scholars working on similar topics also encountered similar problems of operationalization and empirical assessment of diffusion and cooperation processes between authoritarian regimes. I am convinced that a continuation of exchange and discussions within the network will lead to progress that benefits all participants and hopefully leads to new insides and a more comprehensive understanding of diffusion and cooperation processes amongst authoritarian regimes.

The list of the participating scholars was impressive and the paper presentations and discussions were very interesting and inspiring. Especially because the international dimension of authoritarian rule has thus far received little attention by the scholarly community. For me as a PhD student working on authoritarian learning during the Arab Uprisings the IDCAR network provides a unique opportunity to discuss current research projects related to the topic and meet distinguished scholars working on similar issues. I am happy to participate in the network for the WZB (Social Science Center Berlin) with my supervisor and looking forward to future workshops and conferences.

view over the city center of Hamburg from the Alster just in front of the GIGA after the first conference day

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Firenze numero quattro

12/10/2014

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This is the fourth and the last post on my semester at the EUI which has now unfortunately come to an end.

All in all the four month I spend in Fiesole at this truly inspiring and unique place have been an amazing experience professionally and personally.

Professionally, the exchange at the EUI with various communities of researchers has helped me a lot to narrow and cut down my research into more doable pieces. The comments I received in different contexts and formats at the EUI have been very valuable. More than that, the place and the people inspired me to follow up on new projects and establishn new collaborations.

I tried to make use of the fact that in terms of my research topics there was not really a clear affiliation to one research group through engaging with various research groups and disciplines at the EUI. During my last weeks I presented my research in the COSMOS group on social movements, in the International Relations working group, the Middle Eastern working group and the Europe in the World seminar series at the Robert Schumann Center. Engaging with researchers stemming from different dsciplinary backgrounds that confront my work from different angles was a truly unique and inspiring experience for me. To some degree the commonalities of the comments have led to major reformulations and a more specific focus of my disseration project on authoritarian learning processes. With regards to the two papers I presented in the working groups, the discussions really helped me to see the weaknesses and the blind spots and was hence very helpful.

Personally, during my time at the EUI I have gotten to know so many lovely people that leaving now feels actually kind of wrong. The christmas festivities during the last week with the EUIs christmas party and the many dinners with groups of friends towards the end of the semester did not contribute to make leaving this place any easier either. However of course no goodbye is everlasting. As I have been ‘recruited’ to play in the EUIs yearly football tournament in June –the famous Copa Pavone– I will return for that occasion and hope to see many familiar faces around.

Surely the picture perfect sunsets, the city that is basically an open air museum and the sorrounding green hills of tuscany have also made the last few months an amazing experience. No doubt I will miss the dolce vita and the italian lifestyle with the passion for good food, coffee and wine.

sunset from the EUI teracce in Badia, Fiesole in December '14

But enough with the resumee and emotions.

During my last week there was again an interesting conference at the EUI organized by the Robert Schumann Center, which was dealing with the transformation of borders in the MENA Region. It was a very diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars, discussing the various dimensions of transformation of border regimes and boarders in the wider Region. Researchers from IR & political science, middle eastern studies, geography and anthropology to country experts were participating. The different angles on the topic were eminent also at the roundtable concluding the conference. There was a lot of references to the respective personal or case specific experiences and issues that were important to the scholars themselves in their work.

However there were also some more general trends and commonalities that emerged: At least some borders in the MENA Region are more permeable then they have been in decades. The declining ability of some states to control their borders oftentimes goes hand in hand with the inability to uphold the monopoly of violence across their territory. The formal governments in Kabul, Damasscus, Baghdad, Sanaa or Tripoli are domestically not much more than the majors of the respective capital due to the lack of control over the countries territory.

Often with external support from other states or the US and the EU the states in the region try to regain control over their borders forcefully. Actor constellations on regional and local levels and the interplay with the national state level are thus increasingly important when we want to understand border dynamics in these countries.

At the same time as an extreme form of external involvement in some occasions trans- or international interference can change the nature of borders quickly. The best example for this are maybe the recent developments at the boarder between Syria and Iraq.

Furthermore the flow of refugees across borders creates new social realities in the border regions of Turkey, Jordan and Libanon. In that sense the crossing of people also transform the boarders themselves, due to the configuration of societies living on either side of them.

Naturally these issues just give a glimpse of what was discussed during the interesting conference

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MESA Meeting in Washington DC

12/2/2014

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Just a few months after the #APSAonfire breakdown in the Wardmann Park Marriot in DC the Middle Eastern Studies Association yearly meeting (MESA) #MESA14DC was held in the same place this November.

I went there to present a work in progress paper titled: "Authoritarian learning: Morocco during the Arab Uprisings" at the panel: Logics and Legitimacy in State Formation.
The papers presented at this panel were quite diverse and covered case studies from the Gulf (Barhain, Qatar, UAE) to Iraq, Oman and Morocco. They were all trying to come to grasp with legitimation strategies in those authoritarian regimes. Although looking into very different phenomena and means applied by the rulers: From coordinated settlement and the provision of goods to ideology and reinterpretation of national history, in order to assure the loyalty of citizens or even non-citizens as in the case of migrant workers in the Gulf. All in all the presentations at the panel were interesting but as it was a total of five papers there was unfortunately only little time left for a discussion afterwards.

In general the line-up at MESA of scholars working on topics I am primarily interested in, such as authoritarianism in the MENA Region, transition in Tunisia, contentious politics and protest under authoritarian rule and the Syrian conflict was quiet impressive. I tried to see many panels in order to hear some of the researchers that I have been reading and citing since the beginning of my graduate studies. In that respect the congress was a great opportunity to engage with other scholars working on similar topics or the same cases and exchange ideas, arguments and experiences.

Especially interesting was the roundtable on researching contentious politics in the region in which sociologists studying social movements and political scientists focusing on authoritarian governance engaged. Besides an interesting methodological debate on variable based vs experience based research and related why and how questions, the discussion went on to the problems of account evidence and post-script rationalization of events by interviewees. I also really liked the statement by one of the presenters who said: "After the Arab Uprisings Middle Eastern scholars are in the spotlight of the social sciences, but we have to decide what to do with this opportunity." In my opinion researchers of the region should pave the way for a more mechanism oriented approach to the social sciences in times of contentious politcs. This to some extend of course is a plea for more esxperience based research engaging with the field in order to complement the (predominant) model based attempts of conceptualizing authoritiarian politics. This is definately one of the driving motivations behind my work.

to prepare for the conference I went to the stunning study room of the library of congress

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IDCAR Kick-off Conference at the GIGA in Hamburg

Firenze numero quattro

MESA Meeting in Washington DC

Ilyas Saliba

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