~We thank the contributors to this volume for their patience and for providing the scholarship, insight, wisdom and time we needed to make this a book that we are very proud of. We also thank Anna Reeve for the encouragement to pursue the project, and all those people at Rowman and Littlefield International who have worked hard to help us make...

For both Arabic and Persian, the transliteration chart – without diacritical marks – of the International Journal of Middle East Studies is used. The definite article in Arabic (al-) is never assimilated, except for proper nouns where assimilation is often used in the English language (e.g. Ennahdha). For...

~In June 2009, streets across Iran’s cities were filled with protesters demanding to know, ‘Where is my vote?’ These protests developed into what, in 2009, became known as the ‘Green Movement’ and constituted the most serious challenge to the regime in the three decades of the Islamic Republic. Eighteen months...

~In 2009 and 2010, following the controversial re-election as president of the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amidst claims of electoral fraud,~1.Mousavi, Karoubi and Rezai argued that there was evidence of...

~‘In recent years,’ wrote prominent Kurdish author Bachtyar Ali in the week after Kurdish security forces shot and killed two young Kurdish protesters, ‘the president of Kurdistan has often repeated that Kurdish hands would not spill Kurdish blood. But what happened on February 17 showed this statement was...

~The occurrence of an ‘Arab Spring’ in Palestine has been treated more as an issue of interpretation than a statement of historical fact. While editorials published at the time asked questions like: ‘When is Palestine’s Arab Revolution?’ (Sadiki 2011), most academic analyses of the wave of protests either tended...

~The protests that took place in Israel in recent years have been explained in relation to a number of causal factors. These include a loose connection to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the impact of the global economic crisis, and also the deficiencies in Israeli democracy and the national political struggles that relate to this...

~At a meeting of Syrian activists in Gaziantep, Southern Turkey – representatives of Syrian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from both inside and outside Syria, and European donors of projects in support of civil society activities in Syria – the ‘Syrian Revolution flag’...

~Yemen’s Arab Spring-inspired uprising was presented as a model of political solidarity and restraint by media and civil society alike. This narrative was common among various groups protesting against Ali Abdullah Saleh’s thirty-two years in power. Sunni Islamists demonstrated along with Zaydi-Shi’i Houthis,...

~The Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon mused that in the eyes of the world the Middle East had become ‘a place where the burden of the past weighed so heavily and the cultural DNA somehow...

~In the new landscape of Tunisian politics shaped by the 2011 uprising, it became commonplace to accuse the leaders of the Islamist movement Ennahdha of resorting to a divisive politics of identity. It...

~The issue of identity was always a central theme of Edward Said’s analyses. His work challenged many of the deeply entrenched assumptions about identities that underlie and frame the way the non-European world has been presented in much of European cultural production. His intention was to expose not only the fallacy of these...

18 Days, 137, 140,...

~Fernando Carvajal is Lecturer of Global Studies at CSU, San Marcos (United States). He is currently completing his PhD at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. Carvajal has conducted field work in the Republic of Yemen since the summer of 2000, living nearly full time in Sana’a between 2010 and 2014....