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THE 1990s WERE not kind to area studies. They were particularly cruel to Middle East specialists, and even more particularly, perhaps, to social scientists. The job market has slumped as relevant departments have lost positions. Departures and retirements were only irregularly replaced. Foundation officers and other officials in other grant-making agencies who promote guidelines and programs stressed thematics, policy-relevance, and cross-cultural comparisons. Publishers came to avoid monographic studies and seemed increasingly allergic to single-country studies (of most countries). Rashid Khalidi’s Presidential Address to the 1994 MESA conference is only the best known of a host of warnings, jeremiads, and even eulogies offered with respect to current prospects for Middle East
studies.[1]
Most of the reasons for these trends are by now familiar. The end of the Cold War made outlying areas of the world less crucial strategically, which reduced political and financial support for area-studies programs training regimens requiring long-term investments in language training and field research in “exotic” Middle Eastern locales. The bust in oil prices meant that the Middle East, especially compared to East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and Europe, was not the magnet for corporate attention or largesse nor as promising a source of academic funding. Political turbulence in the area continues to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible for scholars, and particularly American scholars, to conduct research in or even enter many countries in the region. Stringent limitations on travel and work in Algeria, Libya, Sudan, most of the Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan have funnelled a huge proportion of Middle East bound researchers toward the few places extended research work is still possible―Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, and (most of) Turkey. But by now many of these locales are relatively well-studied, taking the excitement and competitive edge off of grant proposals and book projects just at the time when they are forced to compete with projects originating in disciplines or in (seemingly) more dynamic areas of the world.
The volume reviewed here is partly an analysis of the frustrations faced by social scientists who specialize on the Middle East and mostly a defense of their work as unfairly imagined to be theoretically unsophisticated and/or
irrelevant.[2] Most of the contributors are political scientists. All are convinced that their own work, and much of the work of their colleagues, is under-appreciated for its engagement with wider theoretical issues and therefore not accorded the respect it deserves. Among the contributors, Lisa Anderson offers a little discussed explanation to the difficulties Middle East politics specialists have been facing. “The last decade,” she writes, “has turned out to be instructive and sobering. Political democratization did not happen in most of the Middle East, and those of us who set out to support and study it were left in many respects normatively disappointed, politically unprepared, and scientifically isolated” (p. 3). As Anderson suggests, most contemporary social science is American social science. The master question, the dominant dependent variable or explanatory challenge for American political scientists has always been the conditions under which (American style) democracy is possible. Leading rational choice, behaviorist, and many historical/institutionalist approaches to the study of American politics tend to assume that questions of political interest are posed within well-institutionalized and transparent arenas of political competition. Anderson points out that these conditions are absent in the Middle East―not only helping to explain why these models are of little use there but also explaining why those guided by the standards of American political science would find in the authoritarianism-dominated Middle East little to inspire interest or attract attention. In somewhat different fashion, Anderson’s comments are echoed by three other contributors―Augustus Norton, Clement M. Henry, and Laurie Brand.
But the entire tone and rhetoric of the volume―marked by defensiveness, apology, and sometimes resentment―reflects a larger fact about the development of social science in the last couple of decades that none of the authors explicitly acknowledge. All across our disciplines the quality of theory, whether neo-Weberian, behaviorist, formalist, or post-modernist, has improved. While the same cannot be said for Marxian theory, which has come to grief with the disappearance of the communist bloc, the theoretical apparatuses brought to bear in political science, sociology, anthropology, and so forth are more elaborate, more precisely rendered, more ready for operationalization, and more able to refine themselves in response to new evidence than the bodies of theory available to previous generations of scholars. If this is true, and it is admittedly difficult to prove, it stands to reason that the comparative advantage of area specialists―their ‘theory-free’ command of the local intricacies of the regions and cultures of their specialization―will fall. Put another way, as the quality of cross-cultural theory improves (even if it remains faulty), the relative attractiveness of training and research on problems that rely on theory-laden approaches increases and the rationale for investing time, training, and attention in ’theory-free’ work declines.
The relative increase in the quality and prestige of theory and theory-informed work explains the most dramatic difference between this collection and edited volumes that might have been issued two, three, or four decades ago. Those volumes would have featured strong attacks on the very idea of the usefulness of contemporary theory and the importance of adhering to the idiographic traditions that were foundations of area studies. In this volume, however, every contributor argues that his or her work, or the work of his or her colleagues, is worthy because it does use, engage, or contribute to social science theory. Indeed, insofar as there is a common positive theme, it is the rejection of (Middle Eastern, Arab, or Islamic) culture as an explanatory variable. This refrain is a far and somewhat ironic cry from the older Orientalist tradition―an approach of scholars who maintained that the peculiarities of Middle Eastern society and culture provided both the basis for their explanations and the rationale for their careers.
Now, however, as this volume shows, scholars of Middle East politics must prove their credentials by the demonstrable theoretical relevance of their work. By analyzing the particular kinds of theoretical engagement and contributions claimed and evidenced by these authors, it is possible to see just how far Middle Eastern specialists have to go before they are rewarded with the status and attention they believe they deserve. Roughly speaking there are three kinds of contributions we might hope and expect to see: 1) studies which use Middle East settings to illustrate or corroborate theories produced by non-Middle East specialists, 2) studies which use Middle East cases or data to test, refine, or contradict theories produced by non-Middle East specialists, and 3) studies which use Middle East problems and data to produce theories which are then made available for application to general theoretical problems or to data from other regions.
Most contributors to the volume perform the first sort of operation, showing that generally available theoretical claims and categories are applicable in Middle Eastern settings. Thus, John Entelis’s discussion of the failure of the Algerian democratic experiment draws heavily on the vocabulary and content of theories of transitions between democratic and authoritarian regimes and on the widely discussed influences of globalizing market forces (incompletely present in the Middle East). His theme is that his explanations for “Algeria’s short-lived political opening [is] consistent with the pertinent theoretical literature in political science” (p. 20). Jodi Nachtwey and Mark Tessler discuss data showing variation in women’s attitudes toward political Islam, suggesting, somewhat weakly, that the interpretation of the spotty patterns they describe are “informed” by “feminist theory” (p. 66). In one of the most stimulating contributions in the collection, Clement M. Henry shows how the analytically sophisticated concept of civil society that he has applied in his study of Middle Eastern banking was derived from foundational work by Tocqueville, Hegel, Hilferding, Gellner, Walzer, and Putnam. His point, he says, is to illustrate “the importance of drawing upon both general theoretical insights and area specific knowledge in seeking to understand many aspects of politics and society in the Middle East and North Africa” (p. 78) Baghat Korany advances a brief but almost bitter defense of Middle East oriented political scientists who, he maintains, have long been doing what Khalidi criticized them for not doing in 1994. As evidence, Korany cites his own research program, applying general models of foreign policy to analysis of patterns of behavior by states and elites in the contemporary Middle East.
Several contributors interpret their data not so much, or not only, to illustrate the consistency of their findings with different theoretical approaches, but to show that Middle Eastern history, politics, languages, field research, and sources can provide important tests, corrections, and refinements for those interested in general theory. Thus Laurie Brand’s excellent essay draws on her research to show how ‘low politics’―domestic economic constraints and imperatives―explain patterns of Jordanian foreign policy much better than popular, highly visible, and high prestige theories of international politics, especially the neo-realist ‘balance of threat’ theory advanced with respect to Middle Eastern alliance behavior by Stephen Walt. Less convincing, but yet seeking to make the same kind of theoretical contribution, is the essay by Tessler and Nachtwey arguing that the distinctive coherence and pervasiveness of Islamic religiosity in the Middle East provide analytically useful comparisons with the much more variable presence of religion in western societies.
Oddly, but instructively, the only contributor who advances a theoretical position advertised as new, as of general applicability, and as the product of engagement with Middle Eastern materials, is Laura Zittrain Eisenberg―an historian. Eisenberg reports research done with her fellow historian and collaborator, Neil Caplan, suggesting a checklist of the kinds of problems that negotiations intended to resolve protracted international and intercommunal conflicts can be expected to encounter. Though the ‘checklist’ approach is a rather preliminary kind of theoretical contribution (“This is not a work in negotiation theory...” [p. 121]), and although Eisenberg’s argument can be faulted in some ways, still the attempt to generate generally useful tools from Middle Eastern materials (in this case, from the Arab-Israeli conflict) is precisely the kind of task that specialists in Middle East politics must undertake in order to be read seriously and often by non-Middle East specialists.
This is a valuable volume, but if its modal claims are true—that the work of Middle Eastern affairs specialists is unjustifiably ignored—then we can expect that most of its readership will be the Middle East specialists themselves. This state-of-affairs will change only when those with close knowledge of the Middle East earn reputations as excellent comparativists and theorists apart from their specialized knowledge, and only when they do the hard-slogging, tough political and scientific work of penetrating into the organizations, journals, professional associations, and departments that dominate the relevant disciplines. One sign of how far is the distance to be travelled is a quick comparison of the number of MESA members who have recently published in two of the leading comparative politics journals―World Politics and Comparative Politics. From the beginning of 1997 to the beginning of 2000, three of MESA’s 2600 members published a peer-reviewed article in these two journals. During the same period, four of the African Studies Association’s 3000 members published in these two journals, while fourteen of the Latin American Studies Association’s 4800 members published in these
journals.[3]
If this quick survey is representative, it suggests that if Middle Eastern oriented social scientists are as committed to the sophisticated use of theory as Tessler, his collaborators, and most of his contributors say they are, then they need to start submitting their best work to journals read by broad comparativists and social scientists studying regions other than the Middle East. The world of science is itself political enough that only in this way will Middle Eastern oriented scholars achieve the recognition, understanding, and influence they may well deserve.
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