The Arabism Debate and the Arab Uprisings
This article explores how the Arab Uprisings have affected academic debates over the importance of Arab identity in regional and domestic politics. Does the spreading of protest from one Arab state to another in 2011 indicate Arabism's continued salience, or does the subsequent rise of regional sectarianism represent its death-knell? Are older debates between ‘New Arabists’ and ‘post-Arabists’ still relevant or is a new framework needed that better reflects the post-2011 Arab world?
Casting the Other as an existential threat: The securitisation of sectarianism in the international relations of the Syria crisis
With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the Sunni–Shiite divide came back to the fore in regional politics. In this context, sectarian identities have now acquired a security dimension, as actors have started framing each other as existential threats. This article aims to examine the process by which sectarian identities become security issues and sources of conflict. We claim that primordial and instrumentalist and rationalist approaches to identity cannot capture the complexities of sectarianism in Middle East international relations. Instead, we draw on securitisation theory to examine the speech acts and narratives leading to the construction of sectarianism as a security issue in the Middle East. We examine Hezbollah’s and Saudi Arabia’s speech acts towards the Syria crisis as revelatory cases in the securitisation of the Sunni–Shiite divide in the post-2011 order.
Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Abstract This article describes the Lower East Side Tenement Museum9s ongoing public dialogue on immigration, the first in the United States. As she joins facilitators in reflecting on the importance of dialogue in a democracy, museum president Ruth J. Abram explains how and why the program was initiated, the obstacles that had to be overcome, and the public reaction to it. Kitchen Conversations represents the museum9s commitment to the proposition that historic sites must function as places of civic engagement, using the history they interpret as a starting place for dialogue on related contemporary issues.