As a result, the articles in the special issue will address the aforementioned three challenges in order to make a profound contribution to the interrelationship between social science theorizing and empirical research on the Middle East in the face of a turbulent and changing academic and regional environment. The planned special issue, edited by Jan Busse and André Bank, intends to address the specific problems which context-sensitive knowledge production on the Middle East is encountering on both a theoretical and an empirical, practical level. This is also being addressed in the AGYA publication ‘ Academia in Transformation‘ edited by AGYA members Sarhan Dhouib, Fatima Kastner, Florian Kohstall and Carola Richter.įinally, how do we make sense of the recent wave of protests that have shaken the region during 2019? Second, these social and political developments emanating from the Arab uprisings and their aftermath have had a considerable impact on doing research in the region south and east of the Mediterranean.
One decade after the Arab uprisings of 2010/11, social science research on the social and political dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa is facing three major challenges:įirst, the Arab uprisings and their diverging political trajectories have turned fundamental assumptions about Middle East politics and societies into question.