Ilyas Saliba
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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.

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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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Florence the third

10/22/2014

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After just two months at the EUI as a visiting student I can say this place is a great environment for pursuing a PhD! (the following observations are based on my experience within the SPS department)
The international environment coupled with the beautiful location, inspiring faculty and smart peers among the PhD students is definately making the EUI a unique place on the continent. The close ties between professors and PhD students and Post-doc fellows is another great feature that I have barely experienced elsewhere to this extend.

The compulsory courses offered are quiet common for PhD graduate programms. Beyond the those a wide array of electoral courses are offered that mirror the interests and diversity of the faculty. Furthermore the many workshops and lectures with dustinguished academics from outside the EUI form a platform of constant inspiration and exchange for young researchers.

Last but not least the EUI also tries to enhance the exchange with practioneers. Although in my perception there is still room for improvement on this issue. Through inviting more practioneers as fellows from different fields -not only EU institutions- such exchange could be further enhanced. Despite all the advantages, if you do not want to stay in academia or go to EU institutions in your professional career after the PhD the possibilities to build a network or gain from exchange with others during your studies at the EUI are rather slim. In the end the EUI largely remains an ivory tower. But definately the nicest one I have seen up till now.

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View from EUI Library in Vila Badia at sunset
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#librarywithaview

However, socially the EUI also is a bubble. Even more so being situated outside the city of Florence on the hills of Fiesole and in a country with a language that most people arriving here cannot speak. Although the EUI offers italian courses and does everything it can as an institution to make the affiliates learn the language, this of course just works to some extend.

The "EUI bubble" is enhanced through the wide range of possibilities of leisure activities that are organized wuthin the EUI framework (not to mention the Bar Fiasko). From a gym to a chess club a lot of activities are offered. Just that this even enhances your social live also being attached to the institute.

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Also this week I was able to participate in a methods workshop on qualitative comparative case studies by Professor Claudius Waageman from the Goethe Universuty of Frankfurt. It was held at the newly established Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), a joint venture of the University of Bologna, Pisa and Florence, which establishes an integrated graduate school for the social sciences in Florence. The rooms at Palazzo Strozzi in the heart of the cities old town are breathtaking. Participating in the course I enjoyed the possibility to exchange views with PhD students from outside the EUI world.




Just yesterday the school (SNS) was officially inaugurated with a lot of tamtam, local politicians and academic celebreties. The inaugural lecture was held by Professor Sydney Tarrow from Cornell University. Safe to say, one of the grandfathers of social movement studies. His talk on the US as an "infrastructural state", which in his view is dominated by a security paradigm that grew out of the war-torn history of the country and is hollowing out important democratic principles was critical and at the same time very interesting. Although the evidence presented was mainly anecdotical and descriptive the narrative was quite convincing.


As I am off to Tunisia next week to whitness the "historic" parliamentary elections I will return the week after with a post on my experiences on the southern side of the mediterranean. As an outlook here is the link to a piece that analysis the transition process in Tunisia and takes up some of the upcoming challenges - (german only).
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PhDlife in Florence the second

10/13/2014

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After a warm-up phase in september, with the beginning of october the semester at the EUI finally kicked in. Which means a lot of courses and seminars start and the EUI community is returning to Florence to cramp up the hills of Fiesole to the institute. After getting settled in Florence I am spending more time up in the Villa Badia at the EUI. 

Lecture by Olivier Roy

Two weeks ago I have visited a  Robert Schumann Center lecture by Prof Olivier Roy with the bold title: "How to Think About Contemporary Middle East"

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Olivier Roy giving his talk at the Robert Schumann Center of the EUI
I found the talk rather hard to follow as I was missing any structure of the points made. However a lot of interesting thoughts were mentioned. Although I do not agree with all that was said the most important points for me were the following:

Islam as an explanation for social dynamics and processes is fundamentally always a culturalist approach to social sciences. According to Prof. Roy this was the blind spot of contemporary political science when dealing with the Middle East. In light of this he was calling for more small-n case driven and fieldwork based social science research on the region, which is more sensitive to culturalist foundations and roots of social and political phenomena.

Secondly, Roy made a good point with regard to the interactivity and the interdependence between social science researchers working on the Middle East and the political leaders in the region and their advisors. Bascically he argued, that a lot of staff and even leaders themselves in the region have studied and read the contemporary scientific and semi-scientfiic journalistic and policy related literature on the Middle East. He implied that partly dynamics can be explained by a mechanism that ultimately works like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Moving on to current issues in Middle Eastern Societies he argued that the Israel-Palestinian conflict can no longer be labelled the Middle East conflict because it losts its relevance across the region. As an example he mentioned that the largest anti-war protests regarding the latest escalation have been held in Europe and in the United States not in Arab countries. Furthermore he said that Pan-arabism and Pan-islamism are the crucial issues for the Middle Eastern countries  at the moment. He thus claimed a discrepancy between the mainstream western media and what the current issues in the Middle East.

He furthermore briefly mentioned his last books main thesis that political islam is a failure mentioning the examples of Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Without having read the book I have to admit that this argument did not quite strike me as convincing. It might be true that political islam as a larger phenomenon in the region is facing certain challenges but besides the Egyptian case I think predicting the failure of political islam might be a bit premature. 

Lastly he mentioned the current developments in Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS as a result of opportunity through limited statehood capacities in the region and the decline of support for Al Qaeda over the last decade. Later in the following discussion Roy also mentioned that he predicts the demise of ISIS as a quasi state organization due to the international efforts to bring it down and its decline to a decentralized terrorist group similiar ot Al Qaida. However he was sceptical about a fast defeat resulting from the military support of opponents and airstrikes. In this point I agreed with the analysis of Roy on the situation in Syria and Iraq.

Last but not least I just want to mention one methodological remark made by Donatella Della Porta during the discussion. She mentioned that some regional and area studies scholars focus to narrowly on their cases and hence oftentimes fail to account for underlying regional or transnational developments, processes and trends. Her reply could be understood in defence of comparatavist social scientists that were cririticized by Olivier Roy for their lack of local knowledge and cultural sensitivity when dealing with the Middle East.

Collaborations and  Upcoming Presentations

Besides the event I am very happy that a first collaboration with a researcher from the EUI is already on the way.  Johanne Kübler is a fourth year PhD researcher working on the blogosphere and the role of the diaspora in political debates in blogs around the uprisings in Northern Africa. Together we are working on a paper project analyzing the transformation process in Tunisia four years after the ousting of Ben-Ali.

Furthermore I am collaborating with Ulrich Krotz as an associate fellow in the Europe in the World programm on matters of political prerogatives of the Arab Uprisings and its trajectories for European policy makers and the European Foreign Policy agenda.

Throughout November and December I will have the opportunity to present parts of my dissertation and a paper project here at the EUI in various working groups and colloquia. I will try to expose my self to a wide array of scholars working here in order to gain feedback, comments and critique from different fields. This is mainly driven by the fact that with my topic I am sitting a bit in between the chairs at the EUI . Thus I will have one presentation in the EU in the World programm organised by Ulrich Krotz presenting my dissertation prospectus. Similiarly I will present this prospectus in the COSMOS colloquium organized by Donatella Della Porta. Furthermore I will be presenting a current paper project in the International Relations Working Group organized by Jennifer Welsh and in the Middle Eastern Working Group headed by Olivier Roy.
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A Semester at the EUI in Florence

9/15/2014

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view over Firenze from the EUI terrace

Long time no post. As you can imagine there is a reason. I have been rather busy with some conferences (ECPR Graduate conference in Innsbruck), a Summerschool (Comparative Authoritarianism in Oslo), teaching (Political Theory seminar at Humboldt University) and writing a reworked and extended dissertation prospectus on my PhD including a literature review.

I hope that I can soon make up for that and deliver some posts on those events and experiences. However the main point of this post is my stay at the European University Insitute (EUI) in Fiesole (just of Florence) that has just began a week ago. 

I am staying at the EUI until mid December as a visiting scholar at the Department for Social and Political Sciences and will primarily work with Donatella Della Porta on Diffusion effects among regimes during the Arab Uprisings and Ulrich Krotz on coordinated international effects on regime (in)stability and with Olivier Roy to get some insights on elite interviews and fieldwork in the Maghreb region. All three of them are based at the Robert Schumann Center for Advanced Studies.

The first week after my arrival was much about setting my self up and getting to know the people and the possibilities the EUI has to offer. Let me assure you there are loads. However as my primary aim dunring my limited time in Italy is to proceed with my dissertation and get two current work in progress papers to the next stage I have decided not to take too many courses or the like but to rather partcipate in selected courses and workshop and use the opportunity to present some of my current work in progress in some of the working groups here over the course of my stay. 

From my first impression the EUI seems like a great place for exactly that and I have already caught myself wishing I could stay longer. But as my fieldwork is up next in the beginning of the next year I will have to return to Berlin for at least a month before leaving yet again.

I will surely post more regularly during my stay at the EUI and report form the workshops and the academic environment on the over the next months. Exiting times are also ahead as I am going to visit my first conference in the US in november at the Middle Eastern Studies Association yearly gathering in november in Washington DC and I am invitied to the opening conference of the newly founded Center for Advanced Studies South Eastern Europe (CAS) in Berlin with the title:  "What makes New Forms of Authoritarianism so Attractive? Rethinking the Shades between Authoritarian and Democratic Rule" to speak on the topic of: Morocco as a role model for constitutional monarchy for the 21st century? (big questionmark). 

I will close with some another foto from the EUI campus to give you an idea of what the charme of this truly unique institution is all about.

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courtyard of the Villa Badia
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    Ilyas Saliba

    is a researcher and PhD student in political science, freelance journalist and photographer interested in Democracy, Transition, Authoritarianism and Security especially in the MIddle East and North Africa.

    From time to time I will publish links, comments and thoughts relating to my research, events, current political issues and the life as a PhD student on this Blog.

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