Arab Spring and Peripheries ─ A Decentring Research Agenda

The emerging literature on the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has largely focused on the evolution of the uprisings in cities and power centres. In order to reach a more diversified and inner understanding of the ‘Arab Spring’, this edited book examines how peripheries have reacted and contributed to the historical dynamics at work in the Middle East and North Africa. It rejects the idea that the ‘Arab Spring’ is a unitary process and shows that it consists of diverse Springs which differed in terms of opportunity structure, strategies of a variance of actors, and outcomes. This book looks at geographical, religious, gender and ethnical peripheries, conceptualizing periphery as a dynamic structure which can expand and contract. It shows that the seeds for changing the face of politics and polities are within peripheries themselves. Focusing on the voices of peripheries can therefore be a powerful tool to ‘de-simplify’ the reading of the Arab Spring and to reshape the paradigmatic schemes through which to look at this part of the world.

This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

Daniela Huber is Senior Fellow at IAI. She holds a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.A. degree in International Relations from the Free University of Berlin. She has worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Tel Aviv and Berlin and as a Carlo Schmid Fellow at the United Nations in Copenhagen. Her research interests include EU and US foreign policies in the Middle East and North Africa, democracy promotion and democratization, the European neighbourhood, and Israel/Palestine.

Lorenzo Kamel is a Middle East Historian at Bologna University and a Research Fellow (2013/14 and 2014/15) at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He authored four books on Middle Eastern affairs, including ‘Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times’ (I.B. Tauris 2015).