“I examine whether a special geographical location (environments around Palestinian refugee camps) is associated with policy gaps in Jordan and Lebanon by analyzing the perceptions of Syrians and host societies. Using the Arab Barometer 2016 data, I find that environments around the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become places where government policies cannot reach, leading to geographical discrepancies in…
Working Papers
The Inconvenient Facts Hindering a New Approach to Refugee Assistance Program — the Labor Potential of Syrian Refugees in Jordan
“Due to the ongoing conflict, most Syrian refugees have fled to countries that neighbor Syria and the governments of these developing countries are now the principal entities for implementing Syrian refugee policies. These policies accommodate refugees in camps or provide refugees with residency in urban areas, but impose severe restrictions on their employment. Betts and Collier, professors at the University…
Launching Revolution: Social Media and the Egyptian Uprising’s First Movers
“Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, we demonstrate how the use of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – contributed to a discrete mobilizational outcome: the staging of a successful first protest in a revolutionary cascade, or, what we call “first mover mobilization.” Specifically, we argue that these two platforms facilitated the staging of a large,…
Rallying Around the Flag? az Iszlám Állam közel-keleti támogatottsága (Hungarian)
“Az előadás az Iszlám Állam nevű terrorszervezet közel-keleti társadalmakban kimutatható támogatottságának okait, befolyásoló tényezőit kívánja vizsgálni. Az ISIS mint a közel-keleti eseményeket tematizáló, Irak és Szíria jelentős területeit elfoglaló militáns szervezet a mögötte álló ideológiai és kommunikációs eszköztárral gyorsan tűnt fel, majd viszonylag rövid idő alatt veszítette el pozíciói jelentős részét. Felemelkedése azonban már jóval korábban elindult, hatása, következményei pedig…
The Lights of Iraq: Electricity Usage and the Iraqi War-fare Regime
“This article explores the lights of Iraq, Iraq’s variety of capitalism (VoC) and its system of public and fiscal governance. The first section examines Iraq’s VoC, which I define oil-led state-captured capitalism with associated oil-led state-captured war-fare regime. In formerly ISIS-occupied territories, war developments turned the system into an Insurgent ISIS-captured capitalism with associated Insurgent ISIS-captured war-fare regime. The second…
Environmental Activism in the Middle East: Prospects and Challenges
“Environmental activism has intensified across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few decades, focusing primarily on environmental issues that affect public health, livelihoods, and essential services. While intrusive security states limit information and stifle civil society, expanding educational opportunities, growing cities, and new means of communication have enabled environmental activism. This includes small-scale, informal, and localized activism…
The Process of Revolutionary Protest: Development and Democracy in the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011
“Research on democratic revolution treats revolutionary protest, and revolutionary protest participation, as unitary events. This conceptualization is at odds with how `revolutionary’ protest often unfolds—protest does not begin life as democratic or revolutionary but grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. Using an original event catalogue of protest during the twenty-nine days of…
Turkey in the Middle East
Turkey, as country with a long history in the region and its promotion of “shared brotherhood”, has exerted a significant influence on Middle Eastern societies. Even though Turkey followed pro-Israel and anti-Islamist policies in the past, its policies have increasingly become anti-Israel and pro-Islamist with the increasing prominence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the Arab Spring, a period in which…
Godly Governance
This paper seeks to investigate Muslim support for religious governance in Arab Muslim-Majority countries, focusing on the role of personal piety. It does so by exploring the relevant literature and deriving hypotheses from it, which are subsequently tested by using survey data of the Arab Barometer (Wave III and IV). The following analysis conducts hierarchical linear regression with the dependent…
Historical Legacies and Gender Attitudes in the Middle East
This paper focuses on transformations of gender attitudes in a set of Arab societies covered by the Arab Barometer. We analyze age and cohort differences in thirteen countries using generalized additive modeling (GAM). We argue that stagnation or even retrogression of gender attitudes in some societies may be caused in part by an ideological shift of the 1970s–1980s, from largely…
Building Decent Societies? Economic Situation and Political Cohesion after the Arab Uprisings
The focus of this paper is the main drivers of the 2010-11 Arab Uprisings across the Arab and draws on data from the ArabTrans public opinion survey, as well as the Arab Barometer, the Gallup World Poll and World Development Indicators. It asks to what extent people think that things are getting better, whether post-2011 regimes are addressing the concerns…
Do Migrants Transfer Political and Culture Norms to Their Origin Country? Some Evidence from Some Arab Countries
This paper explores some political and social consequences of international migration experience and remittance receipt in the case of Arab countries using Arab Barometer survey dataset. The main idea is to address whether persons who receive international remittances or have lived in the past in democratic host countries, namely U.S (or Canada) and Europe, can act as agents of changes….
MENA Populations’ Perceptions of Key Challenges, International Context and Role of the European Union
Survey data from the ArabTrans 2014 survey contains a unique battery of questions pertaining to the perception of the European Union. This report builds on those questions to analyse perceptions of the EU, its development cooperation programmes, its promotion of democracy, the appropriateness of its response to the Arab Uprisings, and the perception of the EU as an international actor….
Gender Equality and MENA Women’s Empowerment in the Aftermath of the 2011 Uprisings
This paper examines gender equality and women’s empowerment in the MENA following the 2011 Arab Uprisings. The paper reports findings from the ArabTrans survey, a comparative public opinion survey carried out in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia in 2014. Around 1,500 respondents were interviewed in each country on a range of questions including a module on gender attitudes….