Suchergebnisse

Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it--and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future.

"This new edition, thoroughly revised and updated, explores both the impact of recent events in shaping the Middle East and the continuities with established patterns of political, economic, and social relations"--

In political science, there appears to be a growing consensus that while methodological pluralism either is or ought to be embraced, everyone still needs to have a puzzle at the center of her research. But what is a puzzle? How do we find them, and what are we supposed to do once we have one? Can there be productive political inquiry without puzzles? In this paper, I examine the centrality of puzzles to methodological debates about how to do political science. I will draw some distinctions between puzzles, problems, and other kinds of questions, but I most especially want to raise some critical doubts about the consensus on structuring political inquiry in ways that prioritize finding answers

Analyses of the spread of the Arab uprisings have been dominated by three comparative angles. Single-country studies have emerged as the most common framework, often put to use in a second comparative approach of examining variation across cases. For example, studies explore which states have had major uprisings and which have not, which uprisings were peaceful and which were violent, and so on (Amar and Prashad 2013; Haddad, Bsheer, and Abu-Rish 2012; McMurray and Ufheil-Somers 2013; Sowers and Toensing 2013). A third approach explores comparisons with other waves of popular mobilization against authoritarian regimes, for example, in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so on (Patel, Bunce, and Wolchik 2013 Weyland 2012). These literatures investigate the complex processes of mobilization, revolution, and transition unfolding in parts of the Middle East since the outbreak of the uprisings in late 2010. From the literature on revolutions, for example, we know that a popularly based movement that brings about some change in political leadership does not necessarily lead to a regime change resulting in a fundamental overturning of an economic, political, or social system. From past cases we have learned that at least some old institutions and alliances almost always reemerge, and what form the new institution will take eventually is often unknown for several years—for example, think of the Iranian revolution, let alone the French revolution. As events in postrevolutionary Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen continue to unfold—and it is questionable whether those revolutions are even over—and as the bloody civil war in Syria continues, these insights provide us with useful tools for examining how institutions, processes, and power relations are changing—and how they are not.