1st Edition
Political Parties in the Middle East
This comprehensive collection addresses the important question of political parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Written by historians, political scientists, and sociologists of the region, the book provides a pertinent analytical framework to understand the often complex and turbulent histories of these political parties, their role within the region, and their prospects in the wake of the post-2011 Arab Uprisings. The authors explore a rich and varied range of case studies including Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco.
This book examines where political parties and organizations have been crucial to shaping contemporary historical events and political contestation, but also highlights their shortcomings and failures to deliver on the ambitions and hopes they had often evoked amongst their supporters. Furthermore, it looks at how political parties and their activities have intersected with important issues and themes such as gender, human rights, international solidarity, revolution and social transformation, and sectarian identity.
This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science, particularly within the MENA region. It was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
1. Introduction
Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Lauren Banko
2. Political parties in MENA: their functions and development
Raymond A. Hinnebusch
3. Protesting gender discrimination from within: women’s political representation on behalf of Islamic parties
Mona Tajali
4. ‘We wander in your footsteps’—reciprocity and contractility in Lebanese personality-centred parties
Christian Thuselt
5. The party, the Gama’a and the Tanzim: the organizational dynamics of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s post-2011 failure
Marie Vannetzel
6. Party and governance in the Arab republics
Joseph Sassoon
7. The origins of Communist Unity: anti-colonialism and revolution in Iran’s tri-continental moment
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
8. Political Parties and Women’s Rights in Turkey
Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat
9. The historical emergence and transformation of the Moroccan political party field
Khalil Dahbi
10. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine during the First Intifada: From Opportunity to Marginalization (1987–1990)
Francesco Saverio Leopardi
Biography
Siavush Randjbar-Daemi is a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Faculty of History at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interests lie in the evolution of the state in modern and contemporary Iran, and the contribution to the public sphere—particularly in periods of relative pluralism, such as the early 1950s or 1979–1981—of a variety of actors, from crowds formed by subaltern parts of society to socio-political elites.
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is a Lecturer in Comparative Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, and received his DPhil in Middle Eastern Studies at Queen's College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (2019).
Lauren Banko is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University, USA, teaching courses related to the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa, as well as Palestine and Israel. Her current research is broadly focused on the impact of colonialism before and during the interwar period of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and in pre-1948 Palestine.
